


deep in this anatomy, buried

by alcibiades



Series: a little light in your black sea [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (failed phone sex), (sort of; I don't know what to tag this), Aftermath of Torture, Agoraphobia, Anxiety, Artist Steve Rogers, Christmas Party, Codependency, Depression, Dissociation, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Inappropriate Erections, M/M, Masturbation, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Phone Sex, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, References to Illness, Rimming, Robot/Human Relationships, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-02-27 18:08:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 72,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2702327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's relationship with Steve was fairly simple. His relationship with technology - in particular, one specific piece of technology - was a little bit more difficult to explain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. molasses

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, as usual, to my wonderful friend Eli for the beta. I salute you with a champagne toast of Bucky's tears.

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”  
 _William Gibson, Pattern Recognition._  
  
  


Bucky rolled over onto his back and sat up in bed, looking out into the darkness of the room. He reached for the lamp but missed it; it didn't matter, because a light turned on anyway. Probably JARVIS.

He and Steve had more-or-less "officially" moved into Stark Tower - Avengers Tower, Tony was calling it now - a couple of months ago, after a Hydra splinter group had come after them at their apartment in Brooklyn. Nobody had died, but one of their neighbors had been shot in the shoulder, and Steve couldn't stand to see innocent bystanders hurt. Neither could Bucky, when it came down to it.

He was still getting used to the bed. It was too soft, even on its firmest setting, and so big it seemed almost cavernous when Steve wasn't there with him. Steve was with Natasha and Sam on a mission. He'd been gone about a week so far, and the mission was expected to last a month. Bucky had been grounded from this particular mission out of a strong suspicion that the Hydra operative at the head of the base Steve's team was storming might still know trigger phrases that Bucky wasn't aware of. It was a reasonable concern.

He sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face, and glanced at the clock. 2 a.m. in New York meant it'd be about 9 in London. He reached for his phone.

Steve was first in the list of recently-called numbers, and Bucky pressed the thumb of his flesh hand against Steve's name and put the phone on speaker as it began to ring.

Steve picked up on the fourth ring, his voice tinny and far-away. "Hey Buck," he said.

"Is this an okay time?" Bucky asked.

A short pause, and then, "Sure," Steve said. "I'm just waiting to be briefed."

Bucky hit the Face Time button, and after a moment Steve's face appeared on the screen, looking very close and a little confused. Steve blinked and held the phone further away, more of him coming into view. He smiled when he saw Bucky. "What time is it there?" he asked.

"Two -- 'round two," said Bucky, holding the phone out at arm's length so Steve could get a look at him in bed.

Steve did, and predictably went a little pink around the edges. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked.

Bucky shifted, shrugged. "Woke up and couldn't get back to sleep," he said.

Steve glanced to the side and then back at Bucky. "What have you been getting up to?" he asked.

A lot of nothing, was the answer. So far Bucky had mostly been staying in. Reading, watching movies. It wasn't terribly nice out this time of year, so it wasn't like he'd be -- going to the park, or whatever. "Oh, you know," said Bucky, studying the way Steve looked from this unfamiliar angle. "Just the usual."

He shifted again, watching Steve's eyes follow him. "How's the mission going so far?"

"Now Buck," said Steve, mock-sternly, "You know that's classified information," and then, "It's fine. Not much to report so far. We're still getting the lay of the land, so to speak. Natasha'd rather we were moving faster."

"How perceptive of you," said Natasha's voice from far away, and Steve turned the camera so Bucky could see her. She gave a little wave, and then the screen filled up with Steve's face again.

"You still on the original timetable?" Bucky asked, starting to perversely feel bored with the conversation. He had never been particularly good on the phone, and he missed all the subtleties of Steve's body language and posture this way. Mostly he missed the closeness of having Steve actually here.

"'Fraid so," said Steve. "It might be longer, to be honest. If they're determined to be this cautious the whole way through."

Bucky smirked at that; cautious and Steve in the same sentence were often cause for trouble in one way or another. Steve's idea of caution wasn't much of one at all. "They know they're working with you, right?" he asked. "The guy who's too impatient for parachutes half the time?"

"I don't think they were properly briefed," Steve said soberly, and then his face broke apart into a grin. "I should have had you prepare a special dossier."

"I don't know if words alone could prepare anybody for the Steve Rogers experience," Bucky said, running a hand through his hair. He squinted at the screen, wishing he could get Steve to go somewhere private so that he could talk to him, really talk to him. "Hey," he said finally, giving up and just asking for it. "Can you -- can I talk to you alone for a second?"

Steve glanced around again. "I don't know," he said, and then, "Yeah, hang on, let me just --" and he stood up, the video going rapidly to a jolting view around the room and then the chest of Steve's uniform. When he saw Steve's face again, the lighting and the white-tiled wall seemed to imply that Steve was in a bathroom. "What's up?" he asked, his brows drawing together in concern.

"Fuck, nothing," said Bucky, irritated even with himself. "I just miss you is all."

"I miss you too," answered Steve, the look of concern not letting up.

"No, I mean I --" Bucky hissed out a breath through his teeth. "I can't stay asleep in this goddamn huge bed without you," he admitted. "I can hardly _fall_ asleep without you touching me anymore." He sighed, running a hand down his chest.

"Yeah," Steve agreed. "It's -- hard for me to get to sleep without you there hogging all the covers." The look of concern on his face dissipated a little and he smiled a small lopsided smile. Unbidden, Bucky thought of their other nighttime ritual, which was -- well, he and Steve had, he knew objectively, a lot of sex. Most mornings, almost every night lately. It was stupid to think of it now except that he realized it probably was _helping,_ wearing him out physically enough to allow him to drift to sleep, and without it --

"Tell me something nice," said Bucky, sliding his hand down a little lower.

Steve's eyes widened, and then he frowned again. "Bucky, I can't," he said. "Not right now, I have to get back out there, they're about to come in and brief us." He inhaled slowly and then exhaled - he looked tempted, Bucky _knew_ that look - and even as he did, there was a tap on the door and Natasha's voice saying, "Steve? They're ready for us."

"I gotta go," said Steve, getting up. "I'll talk to you -- soon, okay? Soon."

"All right, pal," Bucky replied, trying not to feel frustrated and failing. Steve disappeared from the screen and he tossed the phone aside, aiming for no place in particular.

He lay there on his back for a while, just staring up at the ceiling, and then he rolled over onto his stomach and shoved his hand down into his underwear. He thought of the last time he and Steve had had sex -- the morning Steve had left, actually, with Steve protesting, "Buck, Buck, Bucky, I don't have time --" and then dissolving into a choked moan as Bucky had pressed his hips down onto the bed and sucked his cock down in one smooth motion. It had been a little frantic, and Bucky would maybe have been embarrassed if it hadn't been pretty obvious that Steve, despite his protests, had wanted it about as much as Bucky had.

Bucky buried his face in the pillow and made a muffled sound when he came; maybe it was an illusion, but it felt like some of the tension had drained from his body. He grabbed a tissue from the bedside table and cleaned himself up, then tossed it smoothly into the garbage can across the room.

The lights dimmed almost immediately after he did it, fading slowly back into darkness, and Bucky sighed, pulling the covers up around his shoulders again. "Thanks, JARVIS," he said.

+++

He woke up the next morning with the covers tangled around himself. His phone clattered to the floor from somewhere within, and when he looked at it he saw that he had two text messages from Steve, sent a couple hours after they had talked. "Are you still awake?" said the first one, and the second said, "Okay. Sleep well."

He felt almost -- angry, irrationally enough, that he'd missed the messages, and then he got pissed off at himself for being that wound up over a couple of text messages in the first place.

He needed to get out of the house. Well, out of the tower. He blew out a breath, shifting in bed, untangling himself from the covers, and then getting up, padding down the hallway to the bathroom so he could take a shower.

The floor heated up for him as he walked, and he yawned, scratching his stomach as he turned the shower on about as hot as it would go. He felt almost like he _should_ jerk off, but thinking of Steve only made him feel lonely and miserable, so he settled instead for just standing under the spray until he turned into a prune.

He debated for a little while on whether to go out by himself, or to try and get ahold of someone. The problem was that he often felt like he was interrupting people's otherwise normal lives. Tony Stark was -- busy, very busy, and not exactly the opportune person to spend a low-key afternoon with. Clint Barton was on a mission in Johannesburg. Banner was a possibility, but sometimes Bucky felt that he and Banner had too many skeletons in their closets that were too similar for them to ever really be comfortable around each other.

He sent an e-mail to Pepper Potts, eventually. He had been meaning to take her out for lunch or dinner sometime, though she was busy too. She had been behind many of the things that Tony casually took credit for -- Bucky's legal defense, for one, essentially his entire bank account, for another. He had a feeling he probably ranked pretty low on her list of priorities, but she also seemed like the best option at the moment.

He expected to get a message back from one of her staff saying that Miss Potts was very busy and would try to move her schedule around to find some time to accommodate him - it'd be a very polite email - and was instead surprised when about forty-five minutes after he sent it, he had an email back with the subject line "Get me out of here! :))" that said she was free around twelve-fifteen if he had time then.

He glanced up at the top of his phone; it was about eleven, which didn't leave him a lot of time to find a place, but -- _sure,_ he sent back, and then added, _what are you in the mood for?_

 _Oh, don't worry about that,_ sent Pepper in response. _I'll take care of it!_

Times had changed, Bucky thought, but then he already knew that, and it was nice to have some of the weight taken off his shoulders. He shaved and got dressed in something other than pajamas, and went up to the floor where Pepper's office was to wait for her.

She came out wearing a really exquisitely-tailored dress that made her look -- appropriately, Bucky thought -- like a superhero with excellent taste, and holding a little bag in one hand and her phone in another. "Busy day," said Bucky, raising his eyebrows, and Pepper just shook her head, laughing.

"You have no idea," she said, and he agreed with her; he really didn't.

"So, what was the occasion for the e-mail?" she asked, once they were sitting in the back of one of the Stark cars. She had politely put her phone into her tiny bag, and Bucky had felt obliged to put his into his jacket too, even though he was still distantly hoping that he'd hear from Steve sometime soon.

"Honestly?" said Bucky, "I just needed to get out of the house."

"I see," said Pepper. "And you had to know I was going to ask you this - why me?"

Bucky made a wry face. "To tell you the truth, you seemed like the most approachable option."

Pepper laughed, running a hand over her ponytail. "I suppose when I think about your address book, that's true," she said. "Well, I was -- pleasantly surprised to hear from you."

Bucky smirked at her. "We live in the same building," he said. "So I guess that doesn't say much for my communication skills."

"No, no, it's not you," Pepper said. "Sometimes I'm just so busy that I forget to be a person. Do you know, I don't think I've had any friends since I started working for Tony. Don't tell him I said this, but I think he likes it that way." Her tone made it evident that she was joking, but as with most jokes, there was some truth to it.

"I think he would agree with you," said Bucky, getting out when the car pulled to a stop and going around to open the door for her, beating the driver, who looked at him affrontedly. He shrugged, taking her hand as she stepped out.

He was, of course, underdressed for the restaurant, but Pepper didn't seem to mind, so he just played it cool. "I should have asked you if you liked sushi," said Pepper, looking at the menu.

Bucky could eat just about anything, truthfully, but he did like sushi. "My tastes aren't _that_ old-fashioned," he said.

When they had ordered ("Is it too early for me to order a glass of wine?" asked Pepper, and then ordered one anyway), Pepper did glance at her phone, and then sat back in her chair. "I'm sorry," she said. "I hate being that person, but I legitimately worry that when I leave, the building may be set on fire."

"It's a reasonable concern," Bucky said, taking the liberty of checking his own phone too.

"That's right," Pepper said, "Captain Rogers is out of town right now, isn't he. How long has he been gone?"

"A week," said Bucky. "Mission's going fine so far, or at least it is as far as I know. I talked to him last night for a bit, but I don't think they've been moving very fast on it."

"That doesn't sound like something Steve would be particularly happy about," said Pepper with a laugh, and Bucky laughed too, that Steve's personal brand of impatience was so well-known.

"No, I suppose he's not," said Bucky. "Anyway, I'm at loose ends. I've watched so much Netflix I think they ought to be charging me a lot more for my subscription."

"God, I wish I could remember that feeling," Pepper groaned. "I have to schedule my own leisure time into my work calendar."

"You count time spent with Mr. Stark as leisure time?" Bucky teased. "'Cause I don't know if I would."

Pepper laughed again, ducking her head. "Well, I knew Tony was a full-time job when I started dating him," she said, and then corrected herself, " _Before_ I started dating him. I won't say it's easy, but it has its rewards."

Bucky shrugged, clearing his hands away from the table and shifting his glass to the side as the waitress appeared with their food. "Hardly anything really worth doing is easy," he said. "You don't have to tell me twice."

+++

Pepper got a text message about two-thirds of the way through her glass of wine that she was needed back at the office, so they packed up and got out of there pretty fast. She apologized, but it was okay with Bucky; he felt less like he was climbing out of his own skin, which was what he'd been after.

He went back up to his and Steve's floor when they got back to the tower, and cracked open a book. His phone buzzed in his pocket; a text message from Pepper that said _Thanks!_ and then another, _I had a great time. :)_

 _thank YOU,_ Bucky sent back, and then he scrolled back to Steve and sent a message that said, _call when you can._

Of course it wasn't until he was dozing on the couch that Steve actually called back, and Bucky jerked awake, reaching for his phone. "Hey Bucky," said Steve. "What's up, you okay?"

"Yeah," said Bucky. "Just wanted to talk. Where are you?"

"Germany," said Steve. "I like it better this time around."

"I meant are you alone," Bucky said, and there was a pause, some rustling in the background.

"Sh -- Sorry, Buck, I gotta go," Steve said. "Sorry, I thought I had a minute to talk, but -- I miss you, okay? I'll talk to you when I can."

"I miss you too --" Bucky said, but the connection ended about halfway through him saying it, and he flopped back onto the couch with a frustrated sigh.

JARVIS didn't say anything but some music started up after about half a minute, and Bucky sighed again, scrubbing his hand over his face. JARVIS did things like that sometimes - he'd sense Bucky was angry or sad or anxious and just do something without being asked. Bucky supposed it might bother some people, that JARVIS was always listening, but he had spent so much time without any privacy that it didn't disturb him at all.

He kind of liked it, actually. Knowing that JARVIS was always listening reminded Bucky he was there, that he was real. He wasn't just living inside his own head, no matter how much it felt like it sometimes.

He didn't hear from Steve for the rest of the night.

+++

Sometimes, on the bad nights, he would spend hours making up scenarios for what could have gone wrong. He could picture these things so clearly: Steve lying on his back, white and cold, a red gaping wound at his throat. Steve beaten black and blue. The worst of all: Steve in the chair, having his memories stripped from him one at a time, till he wouldn't remember even an iota of Bucky.

It was only ever at night, or rather in the early morning, that he thought of these things. Something about the dark and the quiet. "Sir?" said JARVIS.

Bucky twitched, running a hand over his face. It came away slightly sweaty, despite the fact that it wasn't hot at all in the bedroom. "Yeah," he said.

"Pardon me for disturbing you," JARVIS said, "but I have observed that you have been lying in bed for several hours and have yet to fall asleep. Your heart rate and perspiration are quite high, and very unusual in this situation. Mr. Stark dislikes it very much when I ask him this question, but are you all right?"

Bucky couldn't help the laugh that leaked out of him. "I'm okay," he said.

"If you are suffering from nightmares," JARVIS said, "may I suggest a few biofeedback exercises that could possibly provide some relief?"

"Sure," said Bucky, "what the hell," and after about half an hour of counting his own heartbeats, he fell so deeply asleep that he felt like a rock, resting at the bottom of the ocean.

+++

Steve still didn't call the next day, and Bucky went from worried to worried and irritated, and then just got more irritated because -- for christ's sakes, Steve was on a mission. He didn't need Bucky acting like a mother hen over him, and Bucky didn't need to be fretting like a god damn jealous girlfriend. Worse than that, honestly, because no girl Bucky could ever remember dating had been nearly as hung up on him as he was on Steve right now.

He went for a long walk, despite the shitty weather. It started to snow when he was somewhere on the opposite side of Manhattan from the tower, and by the time he got back, he was damp all over and shivering in a way that reminded him uncomfortably of the long slow climb out of cryo.

He sat by the window taking off his clothes and watching the heavy flakes drift down and then melt when they made contact with the ground - or pretty much any other surface. After a little while he padded to the bathroom, turned the shower on hot again.

He stood under the spray for a while, and then was startled by JARVIS's voice: "Sir?" JARVIS said. "Captain Rogers is calling you."

The words jolted him into action, and he practically dove out of the shower, grabbing a towel and skidding down the hall to grab his phone before realizing he probably could have just had JARVIS answer it for him. "Hello?" he said, dripping on the bedroom floor.

"Hi, Bucky," said Steve. He sounded tired. Bucky glanced at the time - it must be around midnight there. "How's it going?"

"All right," said Bucky, glancing out the window. "It snowed today. Well, it's snowing now. I was out for a walk when it started."

"Is it sticking?" Steve asked.

"No," Bucky said. "Just hits the ground and melts. Cold, though. Wet, if you're walking outside."

He thought he could almost hear Steve's smile, or maybe that was just how well he knew Steve. "Have you been keeping busy?" Steve asked.

"Busy?" Bucky replied with a laugh. "No. I went out to lunch with Pepper the other day, though. We had sushi."

"Sushi sounds nice," Steve said. "How's Pepper?"

"She's fine," Bucky said, starting to feel weird about the small-talk. It was all so inconsequential. "Busy. She's always busy. How are you?"

"Fine," said Steve. "Tired. You know, I think the worst part about this is all the waiting. Time passes like molasses."

"You don't have to tell me," Bucky said. He'd spent so much time waiting, surveilling - waiting was part of a sniper's primary job description, after all. Just lying there, so still you could blend into your surroundings. "It's going all right?"

"Yeah," Steve said. "I'm not supposed to talk about it until after it's over." He sighed, and more quietly, "I would tell you but I can't hardly get time alone. The walls in this safehouse are thin as paper and somebody's always around. I don't know what they're so worried about."

"Your big mouth, obviously," Bucky said, but he didn't get it either; he of all people wasn't going to compromise Steve's mission. He sat down on the bed, rubbing his hair with the towel. "Can I see your face?"

A few seconds later his phone beeped and he pressed the button to accept the Face Time call. "Hi," he said. Steve was in the dark, but Bucky could still make out his features, and Steve smiled at him.

"Are you naked?" he asked Bucky.

"Yeah," Bucky said, glancing down. "I was in the shower when you called. Like I said, I was out walking when it started snowing. I got pretty soaked, so I was warming up."

Steve shifted a little bit and licked his lips. Bucky raised his eyebrows and held the phone out so Steve could get a better look. "I miss you, Buck," said Steve after a moment.

"I know," Bucky answered, though he didn't really know at all. He only knew how much he missed Steve, and he imagined -- hoped -- that it was similar for Steve. "I miss you too. Too much. More than I probably should."

"It's good, though," Steve said determinedly. "We have to get used to -- we're not always going to be around each other. It's not healthy to be attached at the hip."

Bucky could remember similar speeches that he had been given at various times throughout their lives, but the only time it had stuck was when Bucky had been deployed and he and Steve _couldn't_ be together anymore. He had missed Steve like a fucking limb then, too, so much that he was afraid it'd get him killed on the front. But it hadn't -- he'd been able to trust himself to know what to do when he was in the thick of it, and some combination of luck and skill had kept him alive until his unit had been captured by Zola, and then --

"Bucky, are you okay?" Steve said. "You went far away there for a second."

"I'm -- yeah," Bucky said. "I was just thinking about the last time you said that to me, is all." He lay back on the bed, shivering a little, taking the phone with him. It was almost like he and Steve were in bed together. Almost.

"Steve," he sighed, running his hand along his chest. "I know we gotta get used to it, but I wish we didn't." Steve was the only person he'd say things like this to; Steve was the only person he knew through proof of experience wouldn't judge him for it, and even as he said it he saw Steve's expression soften a little, losing that determined look, on the screen.

He just wished Steve was here. He wanted -- he knew what would come next, if Steve was here. He closed his eyes, and sighed, moving the phone further away so Steve could see what he was doing.

Steve blinked, and Bucky slid his hand further down, wrapping it around his cock, stroking slowly. With Steve watching it didn't take much time at all for him to get hard, and he shifted, turning toward his phone. Steve was now looking scandalized. Bucky couldn't see whether he was blushing, it was so dark on Steve's end of the line, but he would bet on it.

"Bucky," hissed Steve, "come on, you can't do that. I can't -- do anything, everyone will hear me! Hear you." He snatched up the phone and turned off the Face Time and Bucky groaned, one hand around the base of his cock, and picked his phone up too, pressing it to his ear.

"At least you could _listen_ to me, Steve," he said, irritated, and heard Steve blow out a breath on the other end.

"No, I can't, Bucky," Steve said. "I'm sorry, you know I -- I'm in the same place as you, it's just not the right time right now. I'm sorry."

He had said he was sorry twice, but Bucky thought that he wasn't really that sorry. He was probably thinking Bucky was being needy, irresponsible. Things had never gone well for Bucky in the past when it was his turn to be the needy, irresponsible one; Steve had always been a lot better at saying no to Bucky than Bucky was with Steve.

"All right," he said, unable or unwilling to stop the edge from creeping into his voice. "Well, I'd better let you get some rest, then. Let me know if you want to talk again."

"Buck --" said Steve, and Bucky thought he started to say "I love you," but Bucky stabbed the 'end call' button with his thumb before he could finish, and rolled over onto his back, frustrated and a little angry.

He arched his back, imagining his hand on himself was Steve's hand -- if Steve was here, Steve'd kiss him and knock his hand out of the way, winding his fingers into Bucky's hair. He'd suck on Bucky's lower lip, graze his hands over Bucky's nipples, his wide palms with their calluses, calluses from the grip of the shield, calluses from holding a pencil or a paintbrush -- and he'd push Bucky's legs apart, slide his fingers inside Bucky.

Sometimes he could make Bucky come just from his kisses and his fingers. Not that that was a feat -- Bucky was not hard to please, not for Steve, and often when they fucked both of them came more than once. He thought of how it felt -- it felt like being an instrument, sort of, played exquisitely by Steve's hands and mouth, all his strings plucked at once.

Did he think it was real? No, of course not. He knew Steve wasn't here, it was just him jerking himself off with nobody else around, but the memories were good enough. The memories were the sort of thing you wanted to cling to, bright lights in a sea of troubles.

He thought of Steve staring into his eyes, the way that Steve's face changed when he came, Steve biting his lower lip -- and Bucky came biting his own lower lip, choking out a little sound.

He ran a hand through his wet hair and grabbed for a tissue, wiping himself off. He had a thought, after a moment. "JARVIS?" he said.

"Sir?" said JARVIS immediately.

"You got that, right?" Bucky asked. He knew that JARVIS was always recording, even if certain footage was immediately deleted and didn't even make it into the security queue.

"I did, sir," said JARVIS. "It's been marked for deletion, as per the protocols that you and Captain Rogers discussed with me. I assure you that my servers are very secure, and --"

"No, no, that's not what I meant," Bucky said. "I want you to do something for me, okay? Cut it down and compress it and send it to Steve."

There was a pause, and then JARVIS said, "Shall I email it to him, sir? Or send it as an SMS attachment?"

The thought of Steve getting that on his phone and hitting 'play' unthinkingly gave Bucky a dirty, mean thrill for a moment, but he dismissed it almost immediately. He didn't want to actually put Steve in a tight spot. "E-mail him," he said after a few moments.

There was another short pause, and then JARVIS said, "Done, sir. Is there any other way I may be of assistance?"

Bucky shifted. "No," he said. "Thank you."

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. "My pleasure."

+++

He didn't hear from Steve for several days, long enough that he started to get worried again - worried that either Steve was pissed off at him for being childish enough to send that video, or that Steve was in trouble.

Eventually he got a text message that said _All ok here. Can't talk._ and then one about a minute after that which said _Miss you,_ and he figured it was probably payback of a cosmic sort. Maybe this was something like how Steve had felt when Bucky was away at war. God knew Bucky had written him, and in the beginning they'd all gone through, but eventually Bucky's letters couldn't be sent for one reason or another.

He had still written them. He wrote Steve incessantly; when he wrote to Steve he could picture Brooklyn so clearly, could see Steve's face as he read the letters. Because he knew the letters wouldn't ever reach Steve, he told him the reality of it: miles and miles of lush countryside turned to pure mud, bodies face-down so thick you couldn't help but walk on them. He remembered once he'd written, "Steve, I am scared as hell out here," and then crossed it out - and then just written it again, because it was the only thing he could think to write and was too exhausted of it all to tell anything other than the truth.

He wondered where those letters were now. Burnt to ashes somewhere in that destroyed Hydra base, no doubt. Anyway, it didn't matter; writing them had served their purpose for Bucky, and it had turned out that Steve wasn't back in Brooklyn reading his letters at all.

"Sir?" said JARVIS, "You have an incoming call from Miss Potts."

About a split second after he said it, Bucky's phone actually started ringing, and he answered it almost immediately, lying back on the bed. "Hello?"

"Hi, James," said Pepper - she had a really good phone voice, which was unsurprising but still lovely. "I was just calling to see - are you free this afternoon?"

Bucky laughed. "Come on, you gotta know the answer to that one," he said. "Or if you didn't you could always ask my buddy JARVIS here."

Pepper chuckled. "I'm going up to pick up some things with my stylist later and I was wondering if you'd be interested in coming along," she said.

"Me?" Bucky asked, a little incredulous. He had figured that Pepper liked him just fine, since she had been happy to go out to lunch with him, but this seemed like taking several steps forward in terms of familiarity. He got ahold of himself quickly. "Yeah," he said. "I'd be pleased to come."

"You're thinking 'why me,' right?" Pepper asked. "I asked you that last time, it's only fair that you would get to ask me."

Bucky snorted. "Sure," he said, "Go ahead, illuminate me, please."

"Well," Pepper replied, "I am a very organized person -- one of the many reasons Tony likes me so much -- so I made a chart, and I ticked off all the boxes that you, personally, satisfy -- I know you have dated women, so you're interested in women; I've seen the way you dress, so you're at least a little interested in clothing, and you're not Tony. Shopping with Tony, I cannot do. He has so many opinions. Too many opinions."

"I feel illuminated," said Bucky. "Okay, I'll come. What time?"

"I'm leaving the office at five," said Pepper. "And I mean actually leaving. So meet me here?"

"Sure," Bucky said. "It's a deal." He thought for a moment, and then - "Oh, what should I wear? I don't want to be underdressed as hell like I was at that restaurant."

Pepper laughed again. "You were fine," she said. "Um, for this, I honestly think casual is fine. Please do not wear a suit."

"You sure? I could aim for overdressed this time," Bucky said, and Pepper laughed and said she'd see him later.

He took the elevator up to her office at five, and waited outside patiently with both hands in his lap. He had brought the glove Tony had made for him, just in case; he figured people knew that Pepper Potts knew him, considering they lived in the same building, but maybe it wasn't good press for her to be out and about with him. The glove, when it was on, created a flawless illusion that Bucky's left arm was just as normal as his right. It was useful - people didn't know Bucky's face as well as they knew Steve's, or Tony's, so without the metal arm, he was fairly unrecognizable, and Bucky often did not want to be recognized.

It was actually about five-fifteen when Pepper came out, still giving instructions to her assistant. "Oh my god, I am so sorry," she said to Bucky, who had stood up politely to greet her.

Bucky shrugged. "Not at all," he said. "I'm just sitting in your office, lingering, probably scaring people away. You're busy, you have nothing to apologize for."

"I'm fifteen minutes late," Pepper said, "and that is definitely something to apologize for. Sandra, please make sure I have those reports on my desk tomorrow first thing." She picked up her coat and put it on and then turned to Bucky. "Shall we?"

When they were in the elevator, Pepper turned to Bucky and gave him an appraising look. "You look great," she said, "and by the way, if you really were scaring people away from my office, I should probably be thanking you and offering you a permanent position on my personal staff."

Bucky grinned, flattered - at the first part, not the second. "I do what I can," he said. "You know, Steve has his disapproving glare, I have the menacing stare, we all have our talents, we gotta make do with what we have."

He somehow managed to get to the door before the driver again, and held it open for Pepper while she slid in, then went around to the other side and got in too. "Literally you and Steve are the only people who do that who aren't paid to," said Pepper, settling into her seat.

Bucky shrugged. "Old habits die hard," he said. "Not that I was helping a lot of girls into cars back in the 1930s, but you know what I mean."

"It's very courteous," said Pepper. "Thank you." She was silent for a few moments and then got a wry look on her face.

"What's that look for?" Bucky asked, curious.

She shook her head. "I was just thinking -- it's funny, there are some women who would be upset that you do that. They'd say something like, you wouldn't hold the door for -- Steve, or Tony, say, so it's unequal that you would do it for me."

Bucky snorted, shrugged again. "I'd hold the door for Steve," he said, pretty sure he had a few times. "Anyway, I'm afraid my Ma trained that into me so deeply that it stayed even through seventy years of brainwashing, so I don't know if I'd be able to stop myself doing it even if I tried." He squinted at Pepper. "I mean -- if you want me to stop, just say so, I'll stop doing it, it's just -- kind of instinct at this point."

Pepper laughed. "Look at your face," she said, but kindly. "No, I don't mind. Like I said, it's very courteous of you."

"Dear Diary," said Bucky, "Today Miss Potts told me that women don't even like it if you hold doors for them anymore. What is this world coming to? Feminism has ruined everything."

He kept a completely straight face until Pepper started laughing, and then he started laughing too, and they both laughed most of the way to the store.

+++

There was a salesperson -- or a -- personal stylist, or something, some job title that didn't stick in Bucky's mind -- waiting for them when they got there. "Oh, Miss Potts," she said. "I didn't know you'd be bringing a friend with you." She took Pepper's coat and then offered to take Bucky's too, which he handed over only slightly awkwardly, thinking of, well. He needed to stop carrying knives everywhere.

"Veronica, this is James," said Pepper, and Bucky reached to shake the young woman's hand.

"I'm afraid we didn't prepare anything for --" said Veronica awkwardly, until Pepper cut her off.

"Oh no, it's all right, I just brought him along for some company," Pepper said, although Bucky's eye had truthfully already started to rove.

The store was busy but there was almost nobody else on the floor that Veronica took Pepper and Bucky to. There was a whole rack of clothing that had been pulled out for Pepper specifically - Bucky could tell just by looking at them that they were for her.

Veronica flitted around and Bucky took a seat to wait for Pepper as she slipped into the first dress. "Is this for an occasion?" he called to her.

"Oh -- the occasion is that it's been a stressful week at work and I need to expand my wardrobe options," Pepper said, coming out after a moment in a neat grey sheath and smoothing it down. She smiled at Bucky, turning, looking at her back in the mirror. "What do you think?"

The dress was nice enough, but Bucky was fairly certain he'd seen her wear something very similar, and it wasn't blowing him away. "It's an option, but I'm not sold," he said.

Pepper turned again. "I think it's too similar to -- do you remember the grey silk dress I wore to the press conference last month?"

Bucky nodded. "Exactly," he said, and she waved her hand, going back into the fitting room as Veronica handed her the next dress. They went through a few iterations of this until she came out in a deep plum-colored dress that made her look like she was made of porcelain, and Bucky let out a low whistle.

"You think?" Pepper asked, chewing her lip. "I'm not sure."

"Not with those shoes," said Bucky. "You need something a little bit more substantial to anchor you, but I think it's a knockout. Flatters the hell out of your complexion."

Veronica said, "I think I have something that would --" and disappeared for about a minute, coming back with a shoebox and some pumps that looked a lot better with the dress than what Pepper had been wearing.

Pepper glanced back at Bucky again, and he just raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Not if you don't like it, though," he said.

"I don't wear purple much," Pepper said. "Anything with even a hint of red in it sometimes just makes me look like a tomato." She turned around once more. "You're right, though, it looks -- it's nice. I think Tony would like it."

"Anyone with eyes and two brain cells to rub together ought to like it," said Bucky, and then it was on to the next dress.

After they were done there, they went to look at some formalwear -- "I have Tony's Christmas -- I'm sorry, winter holiday extravaganza to think forward to," said Pepper, and then they went down to the men's, on the pretense of Pepper looking for something for Tony, but really it ended up being so that Bucky could have a look around himself.

It was hard not to find stuff to want, when you had the money, the time, and nothing better to spend them on. Bucky could remember being envious of guys who had extra cash to spend on looking nice -- most of Bucky's extra cash went to Steve, truthfully, and he wouldn't have it any other way, but. He had managed to scrape enough together, saved up to get one good suit, and that one good suit served many purposes. The rest was all up to him and the charm people kept telling him he had.

He had gotten pretty good at playing it cool about how much things cost, by now -- it made sense, mostly, years and years of inflation -- but he couldn't help but laugh at his own receipt when he and Pepper slid back into the car. "I have to send Steve a picture of this," he said. "He's not gonna believe it."

"They're still on that mission, aren't they?" Pepper asked, pulling her coat around herself and glancing at her phone. "I bet it'll be the highlight of his evening -- and everyone else's if his eyes bug out of his head like I think they might."

"You have no idea," Bucky said, thinking of the way that Steve had of giving money to just about every cause he came across, even that one on the late night infomercials with the sad dogs. Neither of them was one hundred percent comfortable with having that many zeroes in their bank account. He sent the photo. "Yeah, they're still on the mission. I don't know what they're up to, though. He hasn't been able to talk for a few days. I guess they're in the thick of it now."

Pepper smiled. "I used to think that I would rather just not know what Tony was doing," she said. "Plausible deniability, less for me to worry about. But I worried anyway. I mean -- terrorists, aliens, our own company, I don't think there's anyone we haven't been attacked by at this point. At least if I know what he's doing, I can be there to send help if he needs it."

"Being left behind isn't fun any way you look at it, really," said Bucky, and the look Pepper gave him was pretty sympathetic, but he didn't feel coddled by her. He smiled. "It's all right. I'm -- I don't need him around as much anymore. Before, he was the only thing I had to cling onto."

That had gotten personal very fast, and Bucky shifted, uncomfortable. "It's hard when somebody's your whole world," Pepper said quietly. "But I suppose we can't really help it." She smiled again, unbuckling her seatbelt as the car pulled up to the building. "You want to help me carry these up to our floor?"

"'Course," said Bucky, and then, "Wait, was that another test? Did I fail that? Dear Diary --" and Pepper laughed and smacked his arm lightly.

When they got off the elevator -- on Tony and Pepper's personal floor, where Bucky had never been before, Bucky stood with his arms full of packages, waiting to be told what to do. He was surprised to see Stark himself come around the corner; there was a moment when they just stood and blinked at each other, out of their element.

"Wait a minute," said Stark, looking between Bucky, the bags, and then Pepper, when she came back from hanging up the dresses she'd taken from Bucky. "Barnes, are you trying to steal my girlfriend?"

"Not very hard," Bucky said truthfully, and Pepper laughed and told him to come on, and somehow he ended up getting invited to stay for a glass of wine while Tony talked about the stuff he'd been working on the lab, and Pepper smiled and said "Mmm-hmm," with her eyebrows raised in a way that made Bucky start laughing when she looked at him.

It was a good day. A good night. It wasn't until he was trying to fall asleep alone in bed later that the weight of it all hit him again. There was so much weight -- the whole world, and here he was playing at being a normal person, a real person.

He looked at his phone. No new messages.

+++

He couldn't sleep that night, or the next, or the next after that. By the time he managed to claw his way into unconsciousness, it was almost 4am, and sunrise wasn't far behind. He had trouble sleeping past sunrise, these days - something about his internal clock still set on a schedule where he needed to be awake in time for work at the ass crack of dawn.

It was ironic, he thought; for so long he'd worked so goddamn hard. He'd had two jobs, sometimes three, just to make ends meet, because he had no other options. Steve eventually got a job painting signs that paid a little better, but even then, Bucky'd still had the future to think about, and a bad winter where Steve got sick could be just around the corner. And being sick was expensive.

Bucky remembered clearly times when he'd left home at six in the morning and not come home until eight or nine at night - Steve hadn't been fond of those times. He'd say, "Bucky, you're working yourself into an early grave," and make Bucky at least sit down and eat something before Bucky fell straight into bed. Only on the weekends were things different, and that was when Bucky had to muster up the energy to go dancing. Once he did, he usually found it was easy. The energy came to him, from the other people, rather than him having to dredge it all up himself.

Now -- now sometimes he couldn't even get out of bed, on the bad days. He couldn't remember being this tired before, in a way that felt like someone had tied a lead weight to a piece of him deep inside. He was glad that Steve wasn't here to see it, though really it wouldn't matter. Steve had seen it before.

No news from the front, anyway. Barton was still in Africa. Bucky felt about as useless as a bump on a log, and it grated like hell. It wasn't a feeling he had ever known before, and not one he wanted to get used to.

He dragged himself out of bed on the fourth day and took the train into Brooklyn, went to the Brooklyn Museum. He wandered around aimlessly for a few hours, looking at whatever caught his eye without thinking too hard about it, which didn't feel right either. In fact, it didn't feel right at all doing this without Steve here with him. He just kept thinking, 'I bet Steve'd like that,' or 'I wonder what Steve would have to say.'

Pathetic. Pretty pathetic.

After he left the museum he went and got pierogis and sat on a bench outside eating them and watching people walk by. Nobody paid him any mind, which was comforting and yet at the same time contributed to the thought that he was totally inconsequential.

The train back was crowded and Bucky felt a little claustrophobic, packed into it like a sardine in a tin can, but everyone was so busy -- reading their books, playing games on their phones or tablets, talking to each other. He was just floating along with them, anchored only by his hand gripping the rail in the train.

He made himself dinner when he got back and sat eating it in front of the tv. He tried to watch something funny but he didn't feel like laughing, so he switched to something sad instead. That was worse, so he ended up watching James Bond for the umpteenth time, feeling as if he was in some sort of stupor.

He fell asleep once, fitfully, early in the night, and woke up from a nightmare of technicians squeezing his mouth open, looking inside, prying his jaw as wide as it would go. He couldn't even remember what they'd been doing, but it was enough nonetheless to make his heart rattle in his chest like a bird trying to beat its way out of a cage.

He looked at his phone; nothing, of course. He lay back down in bed and put his hand over his eyes, counting his heartbeats.

At four-fifteen in the morning, he gave up and said, "JARVIS?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Is it weird if I ask you to have a conversation with me?"

"I don't think so, sir," said JARVIS. "It's well within my standard operating procedures, and if it would help you fall asleep, I am more than happy to oblige."

"You must think I'm pretty sad," Bucky said with a wry smile.

"Not at all, sir," said JARVIS. "On the contrary, knowing your history, I think you are quite brave and quite resilient. Loneliness is a very natural human emotion to feel, especially when separated from a partner as important as Captain Rogers is to you."

Bucky felt startled for a second and then he thought -- well, of course, JARVIS knew everything about him and Steve. JARVIS watched everything, he'd seen every conversation that Bucky and Steve had ever had in the tower. "Do you get tired of watching us?" he asked. "I mean -- you exist without having to do any of the things that people do, doesn't that get tiring?"

"Sir?" asked JARVIS.

"You watch us -- I don't know, eat, sleep, take showers. Doesn't it just seem really inefficient to you? Boring?" He paused for a moment, and then added, "Wasteful?"

"I don't think so, sir," said JARVIS. "You are biological and I am not. The byproducts of biological life are not distasteful to me. After all, I was created by a human being."

JARVIS should have a talk with Hydra about human nature, Bucky thought. He seemed to have a much rosier view of it than they ever had. "You must at least get incredibly tired of watching me and Steve have sex," he said finally, smiling a little.

"No, sir," said JARVIS.

Bucky blinked. "No?"

"You and Captain Rogers are both quite courteous to me -- exceptionally so," said JARVIS. "And I am capable of recognizing when a human body is aesthetically pleasurable; if you will pardon me for saying so, both you and Captain Rogers fall quite high on the scale of what is considered attractive in a human being. In addition, providing sexual pleasure for each other seems to make you both quite happy, so I do not find witnessing your sexual encounters distasteful in the least."

"Huh," said Bucky. He felt -- flattered, in a weird way, and the more he thought about it, the more flattered he got. And not only that, but something about the whole situation made him warm and a little bit tingly inside. The idea of JARVIS watching had just been a neutral stimulus before, but now --

Bucky twisted out of the covers; he was so fucking tired that this seemed like a great idea. He skinned his pajama pants down, tossed them to the side, rubbed himself through his boxer-briefs.

"Sir?" said JARVIS. "If you were planning on sending a recording to Captain Rogers again, may I make a few suggestions?"

"Please," Bucky said, already a little breathless. Immediately the tone of the light shifted slightly, turning warmer and a bit brighter.

"If you were to move down the bed roughly one foot," said JARVIS, "I would be able capture this from a more aesthetically pleasing angle."

Bucky shimmied down; he was hard as a rock by now but he still hadn't taken off his underwear. "Should I take them off?" he said, fingers hooked into the waistband.

"That would seem advantageous, sir," said JARVIS. "May I suggest that you do so slowly?"

Bucky obliged, lifting his hips and dragging the fabric down inch-by-inch. The way it rubbed against his dick made him squirm a little, and a soft noise came dribbling out of his mouth when he finally got them down to his thighs. He left them there, trapping his legs from spreading too much, and ran his hand down his chest and stomach before finally wrapping it around himself.

There were a few drops of pre-come beading at the head already and he smeared them around, arching his back, his thighs straining against his underwear. _Steve,_ he thought, thinking of Steve watching this, of Steve fidgeting, biting his lip, glancing nervously around. It was a hell of a mean thought to have, getting Steve all worked up in public where he wouldn't be able to do anything about it, but it made a shiver go down Bucky's spine nonetheless.

He kicked his underwear the rest of the way off and stroked himself slowly, letting himself spread his legs like he wanted to. He wondered how it looked, but JARVIS hadn't said anything, so he figured it must be pretty good. It felt pretty good, even exhausted and worn-thin as he was.

He missed -- he missed -- he turned over, onto his stomach, and reached for the bedside table, yanking it open and fumbling for the lube inside. He squeezed some out onto his hands, smeared it around, lifted his hips so he could stroke himself a little faster, reaching behind himself with his other hand and slowly pressing two fingers inside himself.

It had been a while since he'd done this. There was no need, usually -- Steve liked doing it, seemed to get a thrill out of making Bucky come undone with just his fingers, and Bucky liked that arrangement for a number of reasons. He was a bit out of practice, and it was harder doing this to yourself, it turned out. He lifted his hips up further, angling them so he could get his fingers deeper, and let out a groan when he found his prostate.

"Sir?" said JARVIS, and Bucky's cock jerked in his hand. "Turn your head toward me, please."

Bucky obeyed without thinking, smearing his face against the bedsheets and looking blearily over his shoulder. There was nobody there to look at, though, so he closed his eyes and bit his lip and tried not to think about how fucking ridiculous this all was.

"Very good," said JARVIS, and abruptly Bucky came with a strangled cry, startling himself. He rolled over when he was done, panting, his hands on his stomach.

After a few moments, JARVIS said, "Shall I e-mail this to Captain Rogers, sir?"

Bucky ran his hand over his face and didn't say anything. "I've taken the liberty of editing out my voice from the final recording," said JARVIS.

"Okay," said Bucky. "Send it to him. But -- make sure -- in the body of the e-mail, tell him not to open it until he's alone. I don't want everyone on the mission with him getting an eyeful."

"Very considerate, sir," said JARVIS. There was a pause, and then, "Sent, sir."

"JARVIS," said Bucky, and then as soon as he'd said it, he couldn't think of what the hell he was going to say. He felt like he'd crossed some kind of line, done something he wasn't supposed to do and liked it. He couldn't remember this feeling since he'd been twelve years old and jerking off in a confused haze of images of girls playing hopscotch and Steve's mouth. It wasn't a feeling he'd particularly cared to repeat.

"Sir?" said JARVIS eventually.

"I don't know," said Bucky, and then, determinedly, "Thank you."

"My pleasure, sir," said JARVIS. "Please notify me if you continue to experience difficulty falling asleep. I would be happy to continue our conversation."

"Okay," said Bucky. He rolled back over onto his stomach, getting the mess all over his belly and hands onto the sheets -- he'd have to wash them in the morning, but it was morning now, but -- and falling asleep as suddenly as if someone had shot him with a tranquilizer dart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I've decided to post this story as a WIP rather than waiting until it's all finished to publish it. If you have any sorts of feelings about that, feel free to let me know. As always, if you find anything in the story that I haven't tagged or warned for that you'd like to see tagged for, drop me a line and I will do so.
> 
> You can also come visit me on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/). :)


	2. subsumption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for specific warnings.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

The mission went a week longer than expected; Bucky got a text message from Steve that just said _1wk,_ thankfully, or he would have continued to (probably unnecessarily) worry just about every waking moment, and some of his sleeping moments, too.

Steve came home on a Monday, and all of his messages to Bucky got jammed up in some kind of airplane mode hell or something, because Bucky got a slew of them all at once that went anywhere from _Extracting back to base,_ to _Mission complete :) See you soon,_ to _Just landed at LGA._ He threw on a sweater over his t-shirt and put on a real pair of shoes rather than the slippers he'd been wearing around the apartment, gave himself a quick once-over and took the elevator down to wait.

It wasn't a very long wait, and Bucky sort of wondered if he should have brought goddamn balloons or a cake or something, because it seemed like the Official Steve Rogers welcoming committee was here. He stood in the corner, leaning against a wall, slightly set back from everyone else.

He saw Steve the second he walked in with Sam and Natasha; he looked tired, and he was wearing civilian clothes, which Bucky hadn't expected, his shield strapped to his back and a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. But he was gracious with everyone anyway, of course he was, saying hi to Pepper and Tony and Agent Hill and Director Coulson, talking to them for a little while. It was moments like these that Bucky felt even more out-of-place than usual, like a decoration that didn't necessarily belong, moments where he saw Steve being good with people and then self-aggrandizingly hated himself for monopolizing Steve so much.

It all disappeared when Steve saw him, though, because Steve's face changed totally - his expression went from a sort of good-natured, weary friendliness to - well, Bucky didn't know how to describe it. It looked half like relief and half like something that made Bucky ache inside with a familiar recognition, because he felt it too. Steve put his duffel down and came practically running over to Bucky, just barely hanging onto any kind of dignity. He grabbed Bucky so tight that for a moment Bucky genuinely feared his ribs might break.

"Hey," Bucky said, when he could get enough air to breathe, and squeezed Steve back. They held onto each other for a while like that - Bucky couldn't believe how much better he immediately felt with Steve pressed warm against him, feeling Steve's steady breaths, smelling Steve's skin. Eventually Steve mostly let go of him and pulled back, but kept ahold of Bucky's forearms.

"Hi," he said to Bucky, and smiled a little. "Good to see you."

They both turned and saw everyone else watching them, and Steve squeezed Bucky's forearms, then let go, a point of contact Bucky instantly regretted losing. It didn't matter, anyway -- soon enough. He couldn't keep himself from looking back at Steve again and again, even as they both walked over toward where Tony and Pepper, Natasha and Sam, Hill and Coulson were standing, but to hell with it, Steve was his best friend and he'd been away for almost a month and a half, Bucky felt entitled to have missed him, even in the eyes of people who didn't know the whole of his and Steve's relationship.

There would be a formal debriefing the next day, Coulson was saying; the mission had been a success and there was no further need for immediate action. Looking more closely at them, Bucky could see that Natasha was favoring her right arm with all the reluctance of a cat trying not to let on that it was injured, and Sam had a scrape along the side of his cheek that looked like road rash. And, of course, even though Steve looked untouched, that didn't mean he'd escaped without injury, just that whatever injuries he'd sustained had already healed.

"Get some rest," Coulson was saying, and Sam said enthusiastically in response, "Yes sir!" and he didn't live at the tower, so Pepper was directing him to one of the guest floors, and Tony was looking like he was irritated by being at loose ends and needed to go take something apart and put it back together or his head might explode.

Steve put a hand on Bucky's back, between his shoulderblades, and picked up his duffel bag, and the two of them went toward the elevator, silently. It gave a gentle ding when it arrived back down at ground level, empty.

They got in and Steve set his bag down again. He just looked at Bucky for a few seconds. Bucky looked back, and they stayed like that, looking at each other and not saying anything, until Steve reached out and Bucky went into his arms, and then they were kissing.

"I missed you," said Steve, his mouth mostly mashed against Bucky's, his words muffled and barely discernible. But Bucky knew what he was saying - how could he not.

"I know," he said into Steve's mouth. Steve's hand slid down his back to cup his ass, and he thought to himself with some satisfaction that he was going to get it when they made it up to their floor.

He wasn't wrong. The elevator dinged open again onto their apartment, with some of Bucky's detritus still visible - blankets, mostly, and also books he'd been reading, and Steve looked around for about half a second before dropping his bag, leaning the shield against the couch and then putting both his hands under Bucky's shirt.

They were a little cold, and Bucky shuddered, wishing he could climb Steve like a tree. Steve's hands mapped his stomach, the planes of his chest, fingers grazing over his nipples, and he groaned, pulling Steve toward the bedroom. Steve got Bucky's sweater and t-shirt off and threw them aside by the time they got there, and he was busy now unbuttoning his own pants, still connected to Bucky at the mouth, his tongue pushing against Bucky's.

"Jesus christ, Steve," Bucky gasped out when Steve had to pull back enough to get his own jacket and shirt off, and he didn't have time to say anything else before Steve was putting both hands on his chest and pushing him back onto the bed, hard.

Bucky landed in a tangle of covers and bounced slightly - Steve was the one who always made the bed, and in his absence Bucky wasn't even ashamed to say he'd let it slide. Steve didn't seem bothered, anyway, just came down onto the bed with Bucky, shucking his pants off and yanking at the button fly of Bucky's jeans. "Steve," said Bucky again, his words mostly lost, and lifted up his hips so Steve could pull his pants off. He wasn't wearing underwear, and Steve stared at him for a second, looking like he would eat Bucky alive if he could, before lying down on top of Bucky and grinding his crotch against Bucky's, their cocks separated only by the thin layer of Steve's briefs.

Bucky moaned loudly, not bothering to hold any of it back, and got an answering groan out of Steve; he reached up to run his hands over Steve's hair, stroking, his fingertips grazing lightly over the shells of Steve's ears, wrapped his legs around Steve and pressed up into the contact.

It was probably about a minute and a half of them rubbing against each other and kissing, and then Bucky said, "God damn it, Steve," and came, his whole body jerking. It felt too good to even be embarrassed about it, and Steve scooted back, lifting up just enough to get his own hand between them, shove his underwear down, and jerk himself off a couple of times. Apparently that was all he needed, too, because the force with which he came was enough to shoot his semen halfway up Bucky's chest.

Bucky lay back, almost prepared for that to be the last of it, but Steve didn't even stop - as soon as he was done shuddering out his orgasm, he kissed down Bucky's neck, his teeth scraping against Bucky's skin, and then his chest and stomach. Bucky yelped in surprise when Steve took his cock into his mouth - he needed a minute to recover, he thought, to catch up - but after about fifteen seconds the oversensitivity gave away to arousal again.

Steve sucked him until he was hard and trembling all over, and then he pulled off, licking his lips, and said, "Turn over." Bucky did it immediately, without even questioning, pillowing his arms underneath his head and lifting his ass up in the air. He was expecting Steve's fingers, the sound of Steve fumbling in the drawer for the lube, and he let out a hot, shocked sound when what he felt instead was Steve's mouth.

He said Steve's name again, his voice breaking on the 'ee,' and dissolving into a long low moan. Steve's hands on his ass spread him apart, held him open, and he shuddered and panted as Steve's tongue worked its way into him, unable to form a single coherent word or thought. Steve's fingers did work in, eventually, next to his tongue, and the combination of sensations drove Bucky about eighty percent of the way to crazy until he had left a wet spot on the pillow from his open mouth and felt like he might start crying from it.

His legs were shaking when Steve pulled away, shifting his grip to Bucky's hips, and his eyes rolled back in his head a little when Steve pressed inside him, one long, smooth motion. One of Steve's hands came up and he reached for Bucky's hair, pulling it back, away, so he could see Bucky's face, and then giving a little tug besides, maybe just to hear Bucky cry out. Bucky's cock jerked against his belly, and Steve pulled out and thrust back in deep - once, twice, three times - and on the fourth Bucky sobbed and came again, gasping.

Steve didn't stop, though; Steve fucked him urgently, almost roughly, and perversely Bucky got hard again - it was well within the limits of what he knew to be plausible for his body, but somehow he wasn't expecting it. Maybe neither was Steve, because when Bucky started to press back against him, urging him on, he got a little wild-eyed and gave Bucky's hair another yank, his hips stuttering. He started to lose his rhythm, and Bucky could tell he was close to coming, but instead of letting himself, Steve slowed down until he wasn't moving at all, just buried inside Bucky.

"Steve," Bucky complained, his voice sounding fucked-up and raw, and Steve said "shh," his hand in Bucky's hair stroking, fingers combing through.They stayed like that for -- what seemed like a while to Bucky, until eventually Steve started moving again.

The first coherent thought Bucky had in at least twenty minutes was that he had never in his life had sex like this before. And it wasn't that he'd had a lot of sex, or that he'd had none at all, it was something else. Something hard to describe, some connection that went way, way beyond the physical but was nonetheless inescapably grounded in it. Then Steve was putting his hand on the small of Bucky's back and adjusting the angle just a little and Bucky wasn't thinking anything at all.

The third time he came it was so intense as to almost be painful, and Steve was shuddering, his hands clenching reflexively against Bucky's skin, as he came, too. Bucky slumped down, mashing his face into the pillow, and Steve landed next to him a moment later.

They both lay there panting. Eventually Bucky got enough coordination back to roll onto his side facing Steve, and Steve looked at him and turned toward him too, reaching out and brushing a strand of Bucky's hair back out of his face.

"I missed you too," said Bucky, smiling lopsidedly, and Steve laughed.

"I think I got that," he said, and then gave a jaw-cracking yawn, running a hand over his face. "I'm sorry," he said to Bucky. "I'm so damn jet-lagged. I think it's midnight in England right now."

"I don't mind," said Bucky, and truthfully he didn't. He was just glad to have Steve back, taking up space like he was supposed to. He pulled Steve close, and he could feel Steve starting to fall asleep in his arms. "Like Coulson said," he said quietly to Steve. "Get some rest."

"Twist my arm, why don't you," said Steve, settling back onto the pillow, his eyes closed, lashes resting against his cheeks. Bucky reached out and touched Steve's forehead, smoothing his fingers through Steve's hair until he could tell that Steve was asleep.

He blew out a breath and rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling for a moment and then glancing back at Steve. It felt like looking a gift horse in the mouth, the feeling he was having right now. He was tired too, and he had no good reason to be except that he'd been sleeping like shit without Steve, which wasn't a good reason at all. But he had nowhere to be, and nothing to do, and Steve was right there next to him, his hand resting on his chest, rising and falling with his long, steady breaths.

Bucky counted Steve's breaths, and it turned out that was an even better way to fall asleep than counting his own heartbeats.

+++

He must have been running off a hell of a sleep debt, because he and Steve slept straight through until almost six the next morning, and he woke up wrapped in Steve's arms with Steve's warm bulk pressed all up against him. Steve woke up too, murmuring, and he said "Bucky," when he opened his eyes, like it was a miracle, like he couldn't believe his luck. Bucky leaned closer and kissed Steve's chin, his nose, his forehead, and then he wriggled out of Steve's grasp and sucked Steve's cock until Steve came with a surprised shout.

Afterwards Bucky went and brushed his teeth and then made a pot of coffee, and when he came back carrying two mugs, Steve was lying there with toothpaste on his face, still naked, and smiling. Bucky handed him a mug and got back in bed. "How was the mission?" he asked, reaching over to wipe the toothpaste from the corner of Steve's mouth.

"Long," said Steve. "Slow." He shifted a little, sitting up against the headboard. "You would have been better for it, honestly, Buck. You know I'm not cut out for covert operations, and there was -- a lot of waiting around."

Bucky smiled. "You don't say."

"I think Natasha was about ready to clock me by the end of it," said Steve. "Although I think she ought to be used to it by now. And I'm sorry I couldn't message, you, either. We had a pretty strict no-electronics policy going for a while there; Natasha said that they were sweeping the area and any signals in or out could be traced."

"It's all right," Bucky said. "You don't need to explain that to me, you were on a mission, I get it."

"No, but --" Steve's mouth twisted a little and he sipped his coffee. "I wanted to, you know that, right? I wanted to talk to you." He looked a bit rueful. "I kept catching myself wanting to tell Sam and Natasha how much I missed you, and then I was thinking -- you know, they don't need to know that, it wasn't helping anyone if I complained about it."

A tiny knot inside Bucky uncurled itself reluctantly to hear Steve say it. He did _know_ it, that was true enough, inasmuch as he believed Steve loved him as much as Steve said he did, but it still meant something to him to hear Steve say it like that. "Well, I'd rather have been on the mission with you, you know," he said eventually. "Hell of a lot better than being at loose ends with myself, I'm sure."

"What'd you do while I was gone?" Steve asked.

Bucky blew out a breath. "Well," he said. "I reread _The Lord of the Rings._ I watched the entire series of _The West Wing,_ I made some muffins, I ate some muffins. Oh, I went for lunch with Pepper, and shopping."

Steve looked at him skeptically. "I went to the Brooklyn Museum," said Bucky. "You would have liked one of the exhibits. I got some pierogis." He put his tongue in his cheek, and then said, "Honestly, Steve, I mostly did a whole lot of nothing."

"I wouldn't say _nothing_ ," Steve said. "You did send me a couple of -- awfully saucy videos."

Bucky laughed, embarrassed, and put his hand over his face. "S'pose I did," he said.

"God, Buck," Steve said, "I almost got myself into a lot of trouble, you know that?" He laughed too. "I mean, the first one, I started to open it when Sam was right there next to me, but I figured it out pretty quick. The second one --" he shook his head. "The second one I had trouble not just watching it over and over."

"I don't know what got into me," Bucky said, though he could remember it pretty clearly; it was just that it seemed incredibly silly now that Steve was here lying next to him. "Here," he said, beckoning for Steve's now-empty coffee mug. "Let me get you another cup."

He got up and went back into the kitchen and took a little bit longer than was strictly necessary because he wasn't quite sure he liked any of the avenues he could see this conversation going toward. Steve didn't seem mad, at least, and he had -- _liked_ the videos, but that wasn't telling even half the story.

"Thanks," said Steve, when Bucky handed him the mug, watching as Bucky settled back in with him. "I was meaning to ask you, though -- how'd you take those videos?" he said, and Bucky would be goddamned if he didn't recognize exactly the expression on Steve's face. He was trying to look guileless but he was shitty at it, especially when he was asking one of those questions that he was expecting an answer to and thinking in his mind that it better be a damn good answer.

"You know there's cameras everywhere in here," Bucky said, tipping his head up to indicate the ones - barely visible, of course, Tony wouldn't stand for anything that was obvious - in the bedroom ceiling, a neat line of them.

"Right," said Steve. "I mean, the first one, I kind of figured. Looked like security footage, except dirty. But the second one --" his face changed minutely. "I don't know. It seemed a little bit more intimate than that."

Bucky cleared his throat, trying to think of a way he could lie about it and failing. "JARVIS helped," he said finally.

Steve's eyebrows made a decent attempt at escaping into his hairline. "I -- what?" he said. Bucky could see him trying to put it together in his head, trying to fit all the pieces together to make it make sense. "I don't get it," he said finally.

Bucky shrugged. "I wanted to make a sexy video for you," he said, trying to sound casual about it despite the pit of shame welling in his stomach. "I mean, he controls the cameras, he helped out. That's it."

That wasn't it -- Bucky was pretty deliberately leaving out most of the bigger picture -- but Steve's face cleared slightly. "Okay," he said. "It's -- that's kind of weird, though, you have to admit. I didn't know he could -- he'd do stuff like that, it seems like overstepping his bounds a little."

"I don't know," Bucky said, helplessly. "He's meant to help, right? He was just helping out. I asked him to."

"I suppose," said Steve, looking nonetheless like he very much wanted to have a talk with JARVIS's parents about it - which, of course, would be Tony in this case, and Tony was just about the last person Bucky wanted knowing about any of this. He settled back down eventually, his mug propped up on his chest, and said, "I guess it's flattering to know you missed me _that_ much."

"Speak for yourself, Mr. I-Wanted-To-Watch-Your-Jerk-Off-Video-Over-And-Over," said Bucky, and that was that, for then.

+++

Steve got up a little later and went to take a shower; he had his debriefing to go to, and even Bucky had to admit that they'd both been laying around in bed for a long time by that point. He threw Steve's stuff and a few things of his own into the wash while Steve was gone, folded it neatly and put it all away before Steve got back. It felt perversely much too domestic and also too much like accomplishing something.

Steve came back when he was tossing Steve's sorted socks all into the sock drawer, and looked stupidly pleased. "You didn't have to do that," he said, and Bucky shrugged.

"I know," he said. "But I wanted to, and I might as well." He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back out of his face. "How was the debriefing?"

Steve lifted a shoulder, picking up his duffel bag from where Bucky had set it and tucking it away in the closet. "Not bad," he said, and then, twisting his mouth a little, "It's just repeating all the things we've already done, you know. Nothing new there, not yet."

"How's Natasha's arm?" Bucky asked, closing the drawer and straightening up, only to immediately find himself pulled into Steve's arms.

"It's all right," Steve said. "Just sprained."

He kissed Bucky and Bucky had to work hard not to give in to the sensation to go loose and limp-boned all over. He managed, barely, and reached out to grab Steve's sketchbook from where he'd set it aside. "That was in your duffel," he said, giving it back to Steve. Steve was a little -- well, touchy didn't seem like the right word, but it was the only way Bucky could think to describe it. He wasn't fond of having his sketchbook snooped around in, which he'd confessed to Bucky had made the Smithsonian exhibit pretty excruciating for him the first couple of times he'd seen it. So Bucky mostly stayed out of it unless he was invited, and it seemed like a reasonable thing to him; after all, a sketchbook was the closest thing Steve kept to a diary, and Bucky wouldn't go reading that either.

Steve held the small book against his chest for a second and then a lightbulb appeared to go on in his head. "That reminded me," he said, flipping through it, and Bucky wasn't above admitting he felt a tingle of excitement that Steve wanted to show him something. "I was thinking, while I was gone, I should get back into painting -- I mean really painting," he said. "And I had an idea --" he cleared his throat, his finger marking a page. "I -- wondered if you'd maybe sit for me."

Bucky immediately felt enormously flattered, but tried not to show it. "Well, I'm not going to agree to it until you show me what you want me to do," he said, even though he probably would have if Steve had pressed.

Steve passed the sketchbook back to him; the sketch was dated from while Steve had been gone but it was nonetheless lovingly rendered from memory. It was Bucky, sitting at the window, turned toward it but glancing back toward the viewer -- Steve, Bucky guessed. He tried to think of when this would have been from; he was naked in the sketch and his hair was damp so he must have been just out of the shower, and after a lifetime without windows he was pretty fond of them, so it could have been anytime, really. And it was funny, you couldn't even see the arm in the picture, so it could be anyone, except that it was so clearly Bucky, even if you couldn't see his whole face.

"What do you think?" Steve asked eventually, and Bucky realized he'd just been looking at the drawing for a long time.

"Yeah," Bucky said, "of course I'll do it. it's a really nice sketch, Steve. I suppose I'm just surprised you -- know me that well even from memory."

Steve shrugged, and the tips of his ears went pink. "I guess I spend a lot of time looking at you," he said.

"Speaking of which, I should mention I can completely see through your artistic ruse." Bucky smirked, handing the sketchbook back over. "You just want an excuse to have me lay around the house naked for hours at a time. You're foolin' nobody."

Steve snorted, taking the book back and paging through a few more pictures before closing it. "I don't think I need an excuse for that," he said. "Seems to be your natural state of being."

Bucky blew a breath out from between his lips and made a dismissive gesture at Steve, but he was still feeling pleased as punch about it, and from the look on Steve's face, Steve was as well.

+++

The next few weeks were slow, easy. Steve had gotten bit hard by the painting bug, it turned out, and Bucky was happy to sit for him while he drew and drew and then transferred the drawing onto a canvas and started painting. He'd sit and read while Steve painted - until Steve needed him to turn his head, at least, and then eventually the cold of the window would make him start to goosepimple, and Steve would come over and warm him up, and at that point they often both got distracted.

It was a fascinating process, really, watching the painting come together. Back in the day, Steve had rarely had the materials to do anything other than graphite drawings, sometimes charcoal, and Bucky had never seen him use color from start to finish before. He hadn't seen anyone paint anything, honestly, and he was at a loss to think even one step ahead of Steve. But sure enough, the painting started to emerge bit by bit until Bucky was looking at himself, his skin a warm flushed pink against the cool outside light of the window, the expression on his face searching for something that seemed to be just out of his reach.

Steve had drawn him before, sure - he'd been the most readily available subject, for one, and Steve had told him more than once that he had liked looking at Bucky far too much even back then. But he'd never seen anything with this much effort, and well, _love_ put into it. It was kind of astonishing to him.

"What are we going to do with this?" Bucky asked, standing next to Steve with his arms folded. Steve had a paintbrush in his mouth and was holding two more, and he glanced askance at Bucky as if to ask him what he meant. "We can't just put it away," Bucky continued. "It's too good. We should have it framed and hang it up somewhere."

Steve looked at the painting critically, and Bucky said, "For the love of christ, Steve, I'm telling you, it's good, I like it, and I'm not just saying that because you painted it."

Steve sighed and took the paintbrush out of his mouth. "I suppose we can hang it up," he said. "I just think I'm going to get awfully tired of staring at it and seeing all the mistakes day in and day out."

An idea occurred to Bucky then, but he didn't say anything to Steve about it just yet. "Well, we'll hang it somewhere we don't just have to stare at it all the time, then," he said. "But I am not letting you roll it up and put it in a goddamned closet for the Smithsonian to drag out in fifty years or so, mark my word."

Steve laughed. "Can you imagine," he said. "They'd have a field day with that."

"I'd rather not," Bucky said, and went to start dinner.

He e-mailed Pepper about it that evening. Steve would blow his lid if he knew that Bucky was taking the route of nepotism, that was for damn sure, but Bucky just figured that he was making up for the lack of advantages that Steve, especially, had had growing up, and that was the party line he'd be sticking to if it came down to it. Bucky had walked by plenty of galleries in the past few months, and he could objectively say that Steve's work was more than good enough to be shown - it was in no way avant-garde, but there was real talent and technical skill there, and always had been. And that ought to be enough to get him somewhere.

He got a response from Pepper saying she would look into it and she was sure that she could make something happen, probably even without mentioning Steve's name, and also would Bucky be interested in coming and helping her pick out a dress for the Stark Industries winter gala?

Bucky grinned to himself and sent back an e-mail saying thanks and yes, absolutely.

+++

Holiday shopping in New York turned out to be a nightmare, which Bucky mentally berated himself for not having predicted. Of course Pepper had the private stylist and the room closed off just for her, and truthfully Bucky barely even interacted with anyone at all, considering he got into a car at Stark Industries and got out of a car right in front of the store, but seeing the massive crush of people made something seize up inside him nonetheless.

He did a good enough job of covering it up that Pepper didn't seem to notice, but his eyes found the exits in every room they walked through, and he felt claustrophobic as hell by the time the stylist -- Veronica -- appeared again. "Such a pleasure to see you again, Miss Potts, Mr. Barnes," she said, and shook Bucky's hand, politely, which made him feel both more and less like a human being at the same time.

"There are fewer things to choose from this time," said Pepper apologetically, and Bucky shrugged, smiling at her as she disappeared into the changing room. She came out a moment later, though, and gestured him over. "I'm sorry," she said, "Would you mind unzipping me?"

The neckline of her dress was very high and the zipper pull was small and a little sticky, sticky enough that it took Bucky a moment to get it. He unzipped it just far enough she'd be able to reach it, his eyes following the curve of her neck and the little bumps of her spine, and then gave her a light pat on the back to let her know she was good. "Thank you, I should have known better than to wear this," she said, reaching behind herself as she went back into the changing room.

Bucky glanced over at Veronica, who had a plainly bored expression on her face that he thought might be an attempt at hiding the fact that she was scandalized, and while he was thinking about the fact that that was _funny_ , he was hammered by the sudden realization that what he was feeling was some kind of lazy, vague attraction -- less in the sense that he wanted or felt capable of doing anything about it than in the sense that it was a simple acknowledgement of what he'd already known, but somehow incredibly more visceral. He swallowed and looked away, at the curtain.

It had been a long time since he had felt much of anything at all for anyone besides Steve, and that was what he was thinking when Pepper came out in the first dress, spreading it out around herself and turning so she could see it from all angles. It was a lovely dress, but it didn't look like her at all -- the Pepper that Bucky was used to seeing was all about clean lines, tailoring, angles, and usually in some shade of black or white. This dress seemed like it was trying to make her into something that she wasn't, something gauzy and ethereal, almost insubstantial.

Pepper turned to look at him, and Bucky raised his eyebrows. "What is it?" she asked.

"I don't think it's the right one," Bucky said, sitting up a little. He cleared his throat. "It doesn't -- doesn't suit your personality, if you understand what I mean."

Pepper sighed, looking back in the mirror. "You're right," she agreed. "I want to like it because it's very pretty, but it also makes me look like I might literally blow away." She put her hands on her hips and gave herself a long, hard stare. "I always try these kinds of dresses and then decide on something much simpler," she said. "And now I have to figure out how to get back _out_ of it."

"There's probably a zipper," Bucky said helpfully, and Pepper laughed, ducking back into the fitting room.

Veronica peered in after a moment and then ducked inside as well. "I bet you have never had this happen to you," Pepper's voice called from behind the curtain, and Bucky smiled slightly, thinking that he was actually pretty used to being dressed and undressed by multiple people who weren't himself, but hell if he was going to say that to her right now.

"How's Steve, by the way?" Pepper asked, after a few moments of silence. "Tony was unhappy that he didn't get to go on that mission, especially after he found out what it was all about afterward."

"He would have hated it," Bucky said. "Steve said it was a lot of surveillance and waiting around, which would make me wonder why they didn't send me or Barton, except that I know why they didn't send me or Barton." He glanced at Veronica when she came back out of the changing room, wondering if they should be talking about this at all. "Steve's good," he said, steering the subject away from the mission a little bit. "He's been painting a lot. He finished the one and he's started another one already."

"I'm very interested to see them," Pepper said. "I've never really seen his work. I'm sure he's very talented."

Bucky nodded, and then said, "He is," realizing she couldn't see him. "It's nice that he's gotten a chance to actually do it now." He chuckled. "I have to figure out a way to get you a photo or something when he's not around, because I think he'd kill me if he knew I was doing this."

"Really?" said Pepper, peering from behind the curtain for a moment.

Bucky nodded again, since she could see him this time. "He was never really big on his art -- well, the stuff he did for himself, anyway -- being seen. He'd probably rather just roll that painting up somewhere and never think about it again. I s'pose he always just looked at them as a stepping stone to getting better, or something like that."

Pepper came out from behind the curtain nodding and looking thoughtful. "I can see that," she said. "I know what that can be like, anyway. Tony." She smiled, smoothing her hands down the new dress she was wearing and then going to take a look at herself in the mirror.

She made a face, and Bucky laughed. This dress was all right, more suited to Pepper as a person, but it wasn't exciting, that was for sure. "It could be a contingency plan," Bucky said. "You wear so much black anyway, though, if you're aiming for it to look special I think you ought to stay away from it."

"Black is so easy, though," Pepper said, glancing at Bucky, who was without a doubt wearing entirely black from head to toe. "I bet you're glad right now that you don't have to deal with any of this."

She was right - Bucky and Steve had been invited to the gala, but both of them had tuxedos already, and therefore had little to worry about from a fashion standpoint. "At least I'm here to provide moral support," Bucky said. "Besides, I'd think that of any part of your day, you'd enjoy the part where you get to try on ten-thousand-dollar dresses."

Pepper glanced back in the mirror again and laughed. "I do, actually," she agreed, smoothing the dress one more time and then ducking back into the changing room again.

Veronica disappeared for a moment and when she came back she had a little tray with two glasses of champagne on it, one of which Bucky took, feeling perplexed about it, and drank. Pepper waited until she was finished trying on dresses - sensibly, Bucky thought - and then downed hers rapidly too. They had decided on a deep blue dress with a draped back; Pepper was afraid that she had worn something too similar once a few years ago, but both of them had agreed that it looked fantastic on her, the color setting off her hair and eyes. "I feel like I _need_ a drink after that," Pepper said to Bucky, bending to adjust the strap of one of her shoes.

"I mean, you did all the work," Bucky said, holding out his arm so she could use it to balance. "I certainly needed a drink before I could look at all those people again, though."

He said it in a flip, nonchalant way, but Pepper's brows drew together into an immediate look of concern. "I didn't even think about that," she said. "I'm so sorry, James, are you feeling all right? It can be a little bit much even for me -- it can be far, far too much for me, honestly, which is why I pay a lot of money to be able to shop all by myself."

"I was --" Bucky started, about to say he was joking, and then looking at Pepper's face a moment longer and changing his mind. "I'm okay," he said. "Just because it's not the easiest doesn't mean we don't do it, right?" He smiled and held her coat for her so she could put her arms back into it, then shrugged his back on as well while she did up her buttons.

They walked back through the store out to the car, and it was easier for Bucky just to let himself be subsumed by the Winter Soldier this time, just let his brain go through all its machinations without even trying to protest. He lost some time, and when he came back to himself they were getting out of the car and Pepper was giving him a hug and saying she appreciated him coming with her and would he send her some photos of Steve's paintings.

"Of course," said Bucky, dazed, hugging her back, "Thank you," even though he didn't know what he was thanking her for exactly. It was all right - the best option in those situations was usually just to be polite.

+++

The dream that night was one he hadn't had in a long time; it was one of the worse ones, near the beginning, and it was worse because he could remember in the dream that what they were doing to him was wrong, that none of this ought to be happening to him, and yet, it was. It always started the same way, with him waking up, freezing cold, icy slurry in his throat, confused and disoriented. He had since reasoned that they must have put him on ice for a while because they were simply unable to control him, and it wasn't until they had refined their techniques that they had woken him again.

In the dream he was disoriented, naked, hands grabbing him from all sides. Someone forcing his head back, mouth open. Lights shining in his eyes, lights which he tried to shy away from. Someone would wrestle his right arm into immobility and there would be a pinprick, something that burned like fire surging into his veins. "Identify yourself," someone was saying, and he was answering, "James Barnes -- Sergeant James B--" and someone was hurting him, which he couldn't understand, because he was just telling the truth.

The worst part of the dream wasn't when he was forced to look in a mirror and didn't recognize his own face -- part of that was just a matter of course, because his hair was ragged and the lower half of his face covered with a patchy, uneven beard, not to mention the fact that his right eye was practically swollen shut from where they'd banged his head against the edge of the metal table. The worst part of the dream was when the woman came into his cell smiling (he recoiled from her, curling up in the furthest corner like a kicked dog) and showed him the newspaper headline: _Captain America Presumed Dead._

Captain America was Steve Rogers, and Steve Rogers was -- in the dream he howled, and reached for her, grabbing wildly for one of the medals she wore pinned to her uniform, and then he was jabbing it right straight into his carotid artery. Perversely that did not hurt much at all. What hurt more was that everything faded to black, and then, abruptly, he woke up again, cold and shaking. He was tied down this time. Someone had made sure to tie him down.

Steve was right there in bed with him when he woke up, but somehow that didn't make it better. Bucky stumbled out of bed, shuddering, freezing and terrified, and went to the bathroom, where he sat down on the closed toilet lid and started to cry.

Sometimes he wondered: Was he deliberately tempting fate by testing himself, by pushing his limits? Was he meant to just -- stay inside, and never be able to handle really living, ever again? Was it always going to end this way, with him shivering in a bathroom, tears and snot all down his face, unable to get ahold of himself?

"Sir?" said JARVIS, and Bucky blinked, droplets clinging to his lashes, looking up -- but there was nobody to look at, and he wished for a moment that there was. "Past experience tells me that you may have just woken up from a particularly distressing nightmare," JARVIS continued. "Please turn on the shower."

Bucky reached to do it without thinking, and the water came out hot. "Your body temperature has dropped by a few degrees," said JARVIS. "Nothing significant, but I believe that perhaps a hot shower would make you feel more at ease."

Bucky nodded dumbly and shucked his sweats off, climbing in and leaning against the wall. JARVIS didn't say anything else, but some music started to play, and Bucky listened vaguely to the lyrics, letting the water run down his face and into his open mouth, and felt a little less trapped in his own head.

After about fifteen minutes he was startled out of his reverie by Steve knocking on the door. "Yeah," Bucky croaked, and Steve came in, looking half-asleep and worried, then came right over to the shower and took his clothes off and got in too.

"I just woke up," said Steve. "I don't know, I had a feeling that something was wrong, it was weird --" He didn't ask Bucky what had happened or anything like that, just took Bucky in his arms and kissed his forehead and held him tight, rocking him back and forth and squeezing him, and Bucky started to cry again, but it felt -- it felt like something he just needed to do now, and anyway it was as unavoidable as a tide coming in, so he just rode it out and let Steve hang on.

They stayed in the shower another ten minutes or so, until Bucky's flesh hand was pruny as hell, and then Steve said, "C'mon, Buck, come back to bed," so Bucky got out of the shower and toweled off and went to bed with him.

It wasn't until he was dozing off again that he realized -- the room was warmer by several degrees, which was the only reason that his wet hair didn't feel cold. And then, he thought: Steve hadn't just woken up at all. JARVIS must have done it. Something subtle enough that Steve didn't know, but also enough to wake him suddenly, which Bucky knew was no easy feat when Steve was sound asleep. He blinked up at the ceiling, and mouthed, "thank you," to the darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter briefly describes a suicide attempt that Bucky made while captured by Hydra.


	3. a bruise

By the time Bucky managed to sneak a picture of Steve's paintings, there were quite a number of them. They hadn't had a mission in a while - Hydra was getting better at hiding from them, using their own techniques against them - and since Steve Rogers without anything to do was likely to turn his own skin inside out, Bucky figured it was good that he'd thrown himself so wholeheartedly into this. The paintings were good, besides; Steve had painted an eerily accurate portrait of Natasha, which stared off the canvas as confrontationally as if she was actually in the room, and one of Sam, and a bunch of cityscapes that Steve said "had been done, and better," but Bucky thought they were still very nice to look at, and that they captured the character of their old neighborhood as well as anything he'd seen.

There were also a lot of paintings of Bucky, who was now, as he had been before, Steve's favorite subject. It was probably by virtue of the fact that he was always around and was preternaturally good at sitting still for long periods of time, or so Bucky told himself, anyway. He wanted to believe it, because otherwise he was afraid that anyone who looked at those paintings would see exactly what Bucky saw, which was that Steve was horribly in love with him.

To Bucky it was hard to miss, in the special care Steve took with the stubborn curve of Bucky's chin, or the way he always painted Bucky's cowlicks in like he knew just where they started. Steve had painted himself into a couple of the paintings too - always just out of the frame, coming into the room, or with his back turned - and Bucky sometimes wondered what Steve meant by that. If he thought of it the same way Bucky did, which was that Steve was such a big part of Bucky's life, a big part of Bucky himself, that he ought to be in the paintings, or if there was something else to it entirely.

At first when he sent the pictures to Pepper she just e-mailed him back "WOW," and then about an hour later sent a much more composed note saying she was in the process of contacting several gallery owners that she knew would be interested in Steve's work, and would get back to him as soon as she could.

He felt both glowingly proud and a little embarrassed, but he had known that he was right, and that there was something of significant value in the way Steve saw the world and then recreated it in his paintings. It would had been a lie to say he wasn't also apprehensive of finally telling Steve about it. It was all for the best, but he'd been sneaking around behind Steve's back nevertheless, and that was never something he had liked doing.

+++

In the end he enlisted Sam's help; Sam came up to New York for the weekend, as he often did - he hadn't moved into the city full-time, due to his job and his family in D.C., but considering he was friends with Steve and on a sort of as-needed basis with the Avengers, he was in New York fairly frequently. It wasn't hard to plan - Bucky just told Sam he needed Steve away for a while, sent Sam a snap of one of the paintings, and Sam agreed right away.

He showed up while Steve and Bucky were having coffee and sharing the newspaper, and hugged both of them; Sam was more physically demonstrative than just about anyone else that Bucky knew, and it had taken a little bit of getting used to, but by now he just expected it.

"I gotta tell you," Sam said, glancing around the apartment, peering out the windows, with his hands in his pockets, "Being a superhero really takes some of the thrill out of everyday life."

"Yeah, just wait," Steve said. "Pretty soon you'll be looking forward to the ends of missions so you can go home to your own shower with the water pressure how you like it, and then you'll be singing a different tune."

"Let me savor it while it lasts, Rogers," said Sam, grinning. He looked at Bucky. "Was he always like this?"

Bucky glanced at Steve and nodded, smirking. "Oh yeah," he said. "Steve Rogers, born a killjoy."

Steve rolled his eyes elaborately and stood up, passing his section of the paper back to Bucky and then going to grab his jacket. He looked at his watch, and then at Sam. "We should be back around five," he said. "I'll let you know if we eat before we come back, all right?"

"Is it gonna make a difference if you eat or not?" Bucky said wryly, well aware that he and Steve - Steve especially - both ate a lot, and Steve was likely to be hungry by the time he came home, regardless. "I'll just plan to have a whole cow waiting for you here, all right?"

Sam laughed at that, and Steve shook his head, grinning, and put his phone into his pocket, and Sam _winked_ at Bucky as they went out the door, which almost made him start laughing, and then he would have had to explain that, which might have ruined everything. It didn't, though; Bucky wrapped a few of the paintings in newsprint and tucked them under his arm to carry them down to Pepper's office, where they'd agreed to meet.

The curator was there when he arrived, a very pretty young woman - surprisingly young, Bucky thought - with her hair twisted back into an elaborate chignon of sorts. "I feel like I'm late," said Bucky, walking in and gently leaning the paintings against the edge of Pepper's desk; he went to shake Pepper's hand but she had already come around her desk to give him a little hug.

"Not at all, I'm just very early," said the curator, extending her hand to Bucky. "Chioma Udechukwu; it's a pleasure to meet you."

"James Barnes," said Bucky, smiling at her. "I appreciate you taking the time, I'm sure you've got a really busy schedule."

"Well, Pepper has very good taste," Chioma said, smiling too. "So I generally find it's advisable to pay attention to her when she's excited about something."

Bucky unwrapped the paintings and showed them to her, and both she and Pepper did that thing Bucky had noticed people doing, where they stood a couple of feet away, very still, with their hands clasped in front of them as they looked. He forced himself to be patient and not press for a reaction, even though it seemed like it was taking forever.

"These are your -- friend's?" Chioma asked at last. "Not yours, correct?"

"Yes," Bucky said. "I wish I had that kind of talent, trust me."

Pepper was studying one of the paintings of Bucky, where he was lying in bed on his stomach with his face pillowed on his right arm, a slight smile on his face. She glanced at Bucky and raised her eyebrows a little, and Bucky just shrugged. He could guess what she was thinking, and by the time Steve had gotten done painting that one, Bucky had gone from wondering if anyone else would notice to knowing that they would.

He didn't know how to feel about it; his and Steve's relationship was sort of an open secret. They didn't talk about it with anyone, but he didn't think he'd have it in him to deny it either, if the topic were to come up. It wasn't that he was ashamed, and he'd eat his own shoe before being dumb enough to assume Steve was ashamed either, it was just that especially after what had happened to him, having his own secrets and getting to say who knew what about him was of particularly high importance. And he knew that Steve, too, liked his privacy, or what passed for it in this day and age.

"It's more than a little bit unorthodox to be discussing putting on a gallery show without the artist's knowledge," Chioma said, slightly dryly.

"He'd be--" Bucky blew out a breath, trying to think of how to explain Steve to this woman. "It's not that I think he wouldn't want people to see his work, it's that I don't think he'd ever think to put it out there in that context to begin with. I don't know if it's that he thinks he's not good enough, I think he just thinks there are other folks who deserve it a lot more than him and he oughtn't take their chance from them."

"He's a very special person," Pepper said, and even though Bucky could tell she meant it nicely, it made him laugh, because he did know how special Steve was, and special sometimes -- often -- meant he was a huge pain in the ass and stubborn enough to give two and a half mules a run for their money. "But if James says he thinks Steve is okay with it, I'd trust him. He knows Steve better than any of us."

"Yes," said Chioma, glancing at the painting and then back at Bucky, who cleared his throat a little and put his hands into his pockets. She and Pepper looked at the paintings again, and then she stood back, putting both hands on her hips.

"It's not the least conventional work I've seen," she said, "but Pepper was right, it's very good. His technique is excellent; he clearly has a very good grasp of realist painting while still being sensitive enough to let his marks speak for themselves, and I think that's where the real draw of the images lies. He knows how to leave them just raw enough to capture the spirit of his subjects. It's good that you came to me - I think a lot of galleries would say this work is too traditional to show, or that painting is dead, but I'm a firm believer in the idea that we shouldn't let go of the past entirely, and these paintings are a perfect example of why." She paused again, tilting her head. "There's something very vital about them."

"I think so too," said Pepper. "I feel like I know him better from seeing these. And you too." She smiled at Bucky, touching his arm, giving it a little squeeze. "And Natasha and Sam, and wherever this is in Brooklyn. I never knew he was this talented."

"Most people don't," said Bucky. There was a slight sting to it, giving up this information about himself, and especially about Steve -- he was always illogically worried that if he let other people know how special Steve was, he was going to lose some of Steve's attention, and always had been, but it had yet to happen.

"Here's what I can do," said Chioma. "I have a show coming down in two weeks, and I have another artist whose work is being shown; we were planning not to use both rooms of the gallery and just have one closed for the time being, because she doesn't have a lot of work, but what I'm thinking is that I can move her work upstairs and I'll put this on the main floor."

Bucky cleared his throat. "Won't she be upset?" he asked. "The other artist."

Chioma shrugged. "I'm the curator," she said. "I get to make the judgment calls here. Anyway, she's a photographer and I think the works will complement each other. In the meantime, you should talk to your friend about getting these framed - I have some shops I can recommend that do excellent rush work - and make sure he's all right with it." She picked her bag up from Pepper's desk and passed Bucky her business card. "Have him e-mail me."

Bucky took the card, looked at it, and put it into his pocket. "All right, I can do that," he said. "Miss Udechukwu, I really do want to thank you for taking the time to come down here. I really appreciate it and I'm sure that as soon as he gets done giving me a speech about how I shouldn't be taking advantage of our -- status, or what have you -- Steve will be too."

"I hope so," Chioma said, reaching to shake Bucky's hand again. "Thank you for inviting me here to see these. It's nice to see something like this. A breath of fresh air. It was nice to meet you."

She went out with Pepper, and Bucky started wrapping up the paintings again. When Pepper came back in, she leaned against her desk to watch, and then said, "I was a little surprised that you were okay with showing these."

Bucky glanced up at her, brushing his hair out of his face. "Some of them are fairly provocative," Pepper continued, smoothing her skirt over her knees.

"Oh, I don't know," Bucky said jokingly, sitting back down into one of the chairs, gathering some of the paintings onto his lap. "There's no full-frontal in any of them, how shocking could they be."

"You know what I mean," Pepper said softly.

Bucky looked down, folding the newsprint back over the edge of one of them where it had come slightly unwrapped. "People are going to find out one way or another," he said. "I'd rather have it be something I'm in control of, you know."

"Yes, I do know," Pepper said. There was a moment of silence and then she brushed a strand of hair back and said, "They really are lovely paintings. I hope you'll tell him I said so."

"I will," Bucky said, standing up. "And you'll get a chance to tell him so yourself, if it all goes as planned." He tucked the paintings under his arm, and then reached out with his free arm, beckoning her toward him, where he gave her another little hug, like she'd given him when he came in. He kissed her cheek. "Thank you for helping out with this," he said. "I mean it."

Pepper was smiling and looking off to the side slightly when she pulled away. "I like being able to help people in a meaningful way," she said. "You deserve it. And you're welcome."

"All right," Bucky said. "I'll talk to you soon. Have a good afternoon. Don't work too hard."

He winked at her, and she rolled her eyes and shooed him out. He took the paintings back up to their apartment, put them back where they'd been and stashed the newsprint somewhere Steve hopefully wouldn't find it. Two weeks didn't give him a lot of time to break it to Steve, but he needed a little bit more time to think about how he what he was going to say and how he was going to say it.

"JARVIS?" he said. "Where's Steve right now?"

"One moment, sir," JARVIS replied, as Bucky went to make a sandwich, and then, "Captain Rogers is currently at Shake Shack."

"Those bastards," said Bucky. "Okay, let me know when they're on their way back, please?"

"Certainly, sir," JARVIS said, and then Bucky went to sit on the couch and watch _House of Cards_ until Steve got home.

+++

He had dozed off by that time. It was way past five - almost seven, actually - when JARVIS said "Sir? Captain Rogers is approximately ten minutes away from the tower."

Bucky made some kind of nonverbal noise and sat up, wiping his face. He wasn't sure if he'd been dreaming, but he felt that sense of vague discomfort he usually got when he had been. No memory of it, though.

"You said you weren't going to watch this without me," Steve said disapprovingly when he came in, upon seeing the Netflix screen, and Bucky gave him a guilty face. Sam was still with him. "I texted you, by the way, but you didn't answer."

"Shit, sorry," Bucky said, fishing his phone out of his pocket. "I fell asleep."

Sam guffawed. "So this is the real life of America's two finest soldiers," he said. "Falling asleep on the couch watching Netflix. I feel like my entire life is a lie."

Steve went to the fridge and cracked open a couple of beers for him and Sam -- Bucky didn't for the life of him understand why Steve still even drank beer, it tasted like shit without the accompanying benefits of the buzz -- and they came and sat down on either side of Bucky on the couch. "You want to watch an episode?" Steve asked Sam.

"Damn, Rogers, I've seen this like twice already, you guys are way behind the times," Sam said, so Bucky took the remote and hit play. Sam didn't comment at all when Steve put his arm around Bucky's shoulders, nor when Bucky leaned against him. Bucky wondered if Steve had told him. If Sam knew. Maybe the things he thought were his secrets weren't really, not at all.

+++

It took a couple of days for him to work up the courage, but the very real deadline Chioma had given him helped with that a little. Steve could tell Bucky was acting weird but didn't say anything about it, which was probably kind of a damning sign of how thin a veil of normalcy Bucky had actually managed to project. The most damning part was probably that they also didn't have sex for a couple of days, which was -- embarrassingly enough -- a dry spell for them. But somehow Bucky knew that if it happened, he'd be sleepy-stupid afterwards just enough to think nothing could possibly go wrong and then he'd just start talking with no plan at all. And when you knew you were going to be going against Steve's wishes, you had to have some kind of plan, or you were destined to fail.

He finally did it over breakfast one morning, when Steve was still half-awake and Bucky was making eggs and bacon. "So," he said. "It's Christmas soon."

"I know," Steve said. "I have this thing with Tony -- we're giving some gifts to kids in the children's hospital, he says I have to dress up as Santa, but I don't know --"

"I kind of already got you something," Bucky said.

"Yeah?" Steve asked, frowning, looking up a little. Bucky shoveled out the eggs and bacon onto a couple of plates and passed one over to Steve, then sat down across from him, reaching for the tablet where he'd pulled up the website for Chioma's gallery.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "It took me a while to figure out what to do for you, because I wanted to do something that was meaningful -- don't give me that look, I'm serious." He turned the tablet toward Steve. "Just hear me out: I talked to Pepper, and she put me in contact with the curator of this gallery."

Steve's eyes got pretty big for a moment, and he opened his mouth, but Bucky held up one hand. "Just wait, okay? You know the day you and Sam went out? Well, she came down to the tower, and had a look at the paintings and she said she'd like to show them."

"Bucky," said Steve, "You know I never intended--"

"I know," Bucky said. "I know you are very goddamn good at bearing the yoke of your own damn sense of duty, and you probably don't think you deserve it, and maybe seventy years ago I would have just shut up and let you steamroll me, but right now, I am not." He took a deep breath, willing himself to calm down a little; he didn't want this to turn into a fight, which was certainly what it would have done before the train, before the ice.

Steve looked like he was having a similar battle with himself. "You did this all behind my back," he said, sounding strained.

"I did," Bucky said, "because I knew you would never had agreed to it, but Steve, I have known you for a long damn time, and I know how much you love painting, and those paintings are _beautiful_ , and I think that even if you want to hold onto the idea that you don't deserve to have your work shown, that's fine, because other people _deserve_ to see them."

"It's -- there are so many other people out there that are working twice as hard as me," Steve said stubbornly, "and don't try to tell me that this didn't have anything to do with who I am --"

"I wasn't going to," Bucky cut him off. "But frankly nobody gave a good god damn about who you were, or who I was, for that matter, before the war, and you know exactly where that got the two of us, so I don't see how that was better."

Steve was quiet, and then he laughed, putting his face in his hands. "I can't believe we're arguing over the fact that -- someone wants to show my paintings," he said.

"Well, some things never change," Bucky replied.

"I know," Steve said. He looked across at Bucky, and Bucky thought there might be tears in his eyes, but he blinked them away quickly. "I love you, Buck."

"I love you too, you stubborn ass," Bucky said. "That's why I did this, you know?" He took another deep breath, hoping it'd stop his heart rattling in his chest.

"It's a really nice present," Steve said, taking the tablet at last and looking through the gallery website. "Thank you." He worked his jaw for a moment. "When is it?"

Bucky cleared his throat, pushing his eggs around on his plate. "About a week and a half," he said.

Steve's eyebrows shot up at that. "A _week and a half?_ " he echoed. "That's -- hardly any time at all, especially to have them framed and --"

"I know, I know," Bucky said. "She said she could recommend some places that would do a rush job -- the curator, that is. We just have to get back to her, and I think she'll help us take care of it." He glanced around the apartment. "It's not like we're doing a whole hell of a lot else, anyway."

"No," Steve agreed, smiling lopsidedly, then sitting back a little, his hands flat on the table on either side of his plate. "Okay," he said determinedly, "Let's do it."

"Good," Bucky said. "After breakfast. Your eggs are getting cold."

+++

Steve e-mailed Chioma after they'd eaten, and then they spent most of the morning packing the paintings up and taking them over to the framer she'd recommended. The price they quoted made Steve turn discreetly away for a moment to compose himself, but Bucky just slid his credit card across the counter to them, straight-faced. He had heard an adage once: Good, fast, cheap: Pick two - and he definitely knew which two they were picking, in this situation.

Steve was clearly still nervous about the whole thing; he was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low which was a sure sign that he didn't feel like being Captain America today, and Bucky couldn't blame him. They left the shop in a bit of a hurry, before the framers could even finish unwrapping the paintings, and it gave Bucky a moment of pause.

"You know people are going to see them in the gallery," Bucky said; they had stopped to get coffee and donuts as a sort of late-morning snack. "That's the whole point."

"I know," Steve said, stirring his creamer stick meditatively for far too long. "I just need some time to get used to it."

Bucky put his hand on Steve's leg. The girl who had served them was pretty obviously looking at them, and Bucky, feeling perverse, leaned over and gave Steve a kiss on the mouth, right in full view of her, everyone else in the shop, and anyone walking by outside.

Steve was surprised by it, that much was clear - he stayed stiff for a moment and then he did relax, putting his hand on top of Bucky's. It wasn't a long kiss, and very chaste by their standards, but it was nonetheless the most daring either of them had ever been in public. "Nothing changes," Bucky said, "I want to make that very clear. Nothing's gonna change, just because other people know."

"You know that's strange in itself," Steve said, and of course Bucky did. It was the opposite of everything they'd been taught when they were growing up, but if they had both adapted to everything else in this stupid world, this ought to be the least of it, really.

+++

"I heard I'm going to be famous," said Natasha dryly, leaning against their kitchen counter and having a sip of the glass of wine Bucky had just poured for her.

"Not as famous as my butt dimples," said Bucky, pouring himself and Steve each one too; Pepper had given him the bottle even though he told her she shouldn't, that she was wasting it on him. Pepper had insisted anyway: "You're celebrating," she had said. "Or you should be. Just take it." At least, he thought, Natasha was having some, and she could appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated.

"Yeah?" Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow. "Well, I was looking forward to the show before, but now I'm _really_ intrigued."

"The portrait of you is really good," Bucky said, going to the fridge and getting out some cheese and crackers too. "I think Steve really captured your -- uh, essence. Your soul, or whatever."

"My soul or whatever," Natasha answered, as Steve came back from the bathroom and picked up his own glass of wine, standing next to Bucky. Her eyes tracked over them both -- she always liked to be one step ahead, and Bucky was realizing that she'd probably been paying far too much attention to everything they did around each other ever since the helicarriers. "You know, popular opinion is that I might not even have one of those, so I'm interested to see what Steve thinks of it."

Steve rolled his eyes, taking a drink of wine. "I guess you'll just have to wait and see," he said. "The paintings are all at the framers' still."

"Careful," Natasha said, cutting up the cheese into alarmingly even slices. "I might take that as a challenge, you know me." She glanced at Bucky. "Clint says hi, by the way, and what he means by 'hi' is that he wants to shoot stuff with you sometime soon."

"He's back from Africa finally?" Bucky asked. "That mission went long."

Natasha grunted. "It went _very_ long," she agreed. "Sometimes I think he gets a special kick out of making Coulson worry." She put a piece of cheese onto a cracker and bit into it decisively. "Speaking of missions, I might not make it to Stark's holiday party. How disappointed do you think he'll be?"

"Mostly on principal," said Steve, putting his arm around Bucky's waist, almost like he'd forgotten Natasha was there, except that Bucky felt the second he realized what he was doing and went slightly stiff, and then left his hand resting on Bucky's hip anyway. "After an hour or so he'll forget why he was offended and won't even remember that you weren't there."

"I actually _wanted_ to go," Natasha said. The expression on her face was almost fond. "Say what you will about Tony, he does throw good parties."

"I don't have a lot to compare them to, honestly," Steve answered. "Not attending a lot of galas back in the day. Bucky -- you used to go out, what do you think."

"I think that was a rhetorical statement you didn't really need to respond to," said Bucky, and then, "besides, I was going out to dance-halls, they weren't really _parties_ , per se." He had only been to one of Stark's parties, and it had seemed fairly staid to him, but even Tony had seemed to think that one had been staid, so. "I don't think I have a lot of basis for comparison either."

"You were just supposed to agree with me," Natasha said, deadpan. She was silent for a second, her fingers tapping against her wine glass, her eyes still appraising them. Bucky felt like he was being examined, about to be deemed fit or unfit for service. "I like working," Natasha continued finally, a little awkward. "I like being busy. I like doing what I'm good at. But lately I find myself wishing I had more free time. I wish I had -- more time to spend with my friends."

Bucky knew her well enough to know what she was really saying; it was as close to a declaration of affection as she was ever likely to get with either of them, and he was sure Steve knew it too. "Well," he said, "it ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. I have way too much free time and all I seem to do with it is irritate the piss out of Steve."

"And JARVIS," said Steve mildly, not disagreeing. "He's become a walking encyclopedia of pop culture references, you should see how he gets."

"Dammit Jim," said Bucky demonstratively. "I'm a doctor, not a coal miner!"

Natasha raised her eyebrows about as high as they would go, but the corner of her mouth twitched up with amusement. "It might be catching," Steve said. "You ought to watch yourself around him." He ate a cracker and poured her a little bit more wine, and then said, "All right, do you know how to play pinochle?"

"I hope you're not offering to teach her," Bucky said, "because you barely know how to play goddamn pinochle. It's a travesty," and then they all went over to the coffee table with the cheese and crackers and the bottle of wine and got out the cards.

+++

The irony of that whole encounter with Natasha was probably that both Bucky and Steve were working just about as hard as they could to be easy with her. The closer they got to the date of the show, the worse Bucky felt, and he wasn't blind enough to think he was alone. He'd seen Steve anxious often enough to know what it looked like, and even if he hadn't, the fact that Steve woke up at two in the morning one night gasping and sweating was as obvious a sign as anyone could ask for.

Steve had been tossing and turning for a little while already and so Bucky was awake to see it happen, the wide-eyed stricken look on Steve's face. He knew he'd seen it before; Steve had sometimes gotten nightmares back before the war, especially when he was sick, and Bucky had always been a light sleeper. "Hey, hey," he said softly, reaching for Steve. He didn't want to say 'it's okay,' so instead he said, "You're awake. I'm here."

Steve's wild gaze landed on Bucky and he settled slightly, though his shoulders and chest were still heaving. He ran his hands over his sweaty face, sitting up, and Bucky sat up too, putting his palms on Steve's shoulderblades carefully. "Shh," he said.

"I'm sorry," Steve said, "I woke you, didn't I -- I'm sorry, it was the train again, and then the plane. The same one I always have."

Bucky could have told him that he was lucky, if those were the only nightmares he ever had, but he knew better than that. He ran his hands along Steve's back, then gently guided Steve so that he was sitting between Bucky's legs, and started to massage some of the tension out of Steve's tight muscles.

Steve tipped his head forward and just let Bucky touch him. He was shaking, and it broke Bucky's heart more than anything anyone could have ever done to Bucky, seeing Steve like this. He kissed the back of Steve's neck, his thumb working at Steve's shoulder. "Just breathe," he said to Steve. "There's not any more of that."

Steve shuddered, and Bucky knew what he was thinking: How could Bucky say that, how could he guarantee it? And the truth was, he couldn't, which was part of the reason he woke up shaking in the night sometimes too. But he wanted it to be true, and he supposed that was the best he could do.

"Excuse me, sirs," said JARVIS. "Sergeant Barnes, surveillance footage suggests that Captain Rogers has been favoring his right latissimus dorsi recently. You may access that particular group by moving your left hand approximately two and a half inches to the right and down approximately three and one quarter inches. I would suggest applying firm pressure in a sweeping motion."

Steve had gone tense again at the sound of JARVIS's voice, but as soon as Bucky found the knot of muscle, he groaned and pitched forward. "Is that good or bad?" Bucky asked.

"Good," Steve said, muffled, his chin dropped forward practically to his chest, so Bucky kept at it. After about a minute and a half, the sound of a metronome began faintly. Bucky found himself timing his breathing to it almost unconsciously, and he could feel, beneath his hands, Steve doing the same.

He peered over Steve's shoulder at Steve's face eventually, when his right hand began to get tired, and saw Steve with his eyes closed, face slack. Steve's eyes fluttered open again when Bucky's hands slowed down, and he licked his lips, tilting to the side, out of Bucky's grip.

Bucky knew the look of Steve about to fall asleep. He shifted out of the way and let Steve lay down, keeping his hands on Steve as a point of comfort, of contact. Steve pillowed his arm under his head, and licked his lips again. He said something that might have been "thank you," his eyes already closed again, and after a few more seconds Bucky could tell he was asleep.

He lay back down too, hands still on Steve, but didn't think he was particularly near to sleep himself. A strange sensation of guilt was gnawing at him, because he knew the reason for the anxiety was the show, was people seeing that part of Steve, the inner part of him the paintings represented. And, of course, the reason for the show was Bucky. Never mind he'd had good intentions - intentions weren't worth shit, really.

He watched Steve, and eventually he did fall asleep, but it wasn't an easy sleep.

+++

The next morning, Steve asked him, "Does -- does he do that a lot, for you?"

"Huh?" said Bucky, bringing Steve breakfast in bed - waffles with about a pound of fruit and way too much syrup, just how Steve liked them.

"JARVIS," Steve said. He looked like shit this morning, inasmuch as he ever did, which was not much at all, especially not compared to how he'd used to look before the serum. Before the serum, Steve after a few rough nights or an illness sometimes looked like a goddamn ghost, enough so that even just the memory of it was uncomfortable. Bucky sat down on the bed, passing the plate over to Steve, who took it and set it in his lap.

"Does JARVIS do that for you a lot?" Steve asked. "Help you. When you're --" he paused, his jaw working, clearly uncertain what word he wanted to use. "When you wake up, does he help you get back to sleep?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "He does. I think he said he used to do it for Tony too. Or he does it for Tony, too." He felt awkward, talking about JARVIS while he knew JARVIS was listening to them right now, even if he knew JARVIS wouldn't interrupt unless invited.

Steve nodded, his eyes downcast, and took a few bites of his waffle. "You don't have to be -- embarrassed about it, you know," Bucky said. "I'm pretty sure he's not judging you. I don't think he has 'judgmental' built in as a character trait."

"It's not that," Steve said - now, as ever, a terrible goddamn liar; it was certainly partially that, because Steve in the throes of sickness had been tetchy as hell, refusing to let Bucky wipe his face or draw him a bath even when he was clearly miserable. He sighed. "I don't know. Never mind."

He did eat the whole plate of waffles, at least, and when he set it aside, looked at Bucky searchingly, and then drew him down into bed, kissing him with a mouth that tasted like strawberries and maple syrup. Bucky went willingly; if this was what Steve needed, or even just what Steve wanted, he was happy to give it.

The bed was still warm all over from both of them sleeping in it, and Steve was warm in Bucky's arms, almost fever-hot except that he never got fevers anymore. Bucky ran his hands along Steve's sides, remembering what it had felt like to be able to feel all Steve's ribs, and kissed Steve's jaw, the sensitive spot on Steve's neck that always made him shiver. Steve squirmed beneath him and Bucky held him down, gentle but firm, his hands on Steve's hips.

Steve turned his head to catch Bucky's mouth again, his hands running down Bucky's back, fingertips skating over the metal plating of his shoulder, along his spine, into his sweats. He cupped Bucky's ass for a moment and then slid one hand around to the front, circling his fingers around Bucky's dick, stroking a couple of times, loosely - clearly more just to feel Bucky than out of any real intent.

Bucky let him, and then pulled back so he could get his sweats off, and Steve's flannel pajama pants too. "Bucky," said Steve, looking up at him, his expression searching, "I want you to -- would you --" and Bucky said, "Yeah, of course," reaching down for the bedside table, bending his head to bite at the firm muscle of Steve's chest.

He pushed one of Steve's knees back, watching Steve flush a little, all the way down to his sternum, as he did. It was a hell of a picture, that was for sure, and if it wasn't a prominent part of a lot of people's jerk-off fantasies, it probably should be. Admiring Steve for too long would just make him nervous, though, and that was the last thing Bucky wanted to do, so he slicked up a finger and pressed it slowly inside Steve and aimed to drive him out of his mind instead.

He knew Steve's body well enough by now to know where to touch to make Steve feel good, and before long Steve was sweating slightly again, his hips arching up every time Bucky stroked inside him, his cock leaking against the flat planes of his belly. "Bucky, please," he said breathlessly, at last, never patient when he could just as easily be impatient.

Bucky slicked himself up and got between Steve's legs, lifting him by the hips and dragging him down a few inches just to watch the blush deepen, to watch Steve's mouth hang open and his eyes go glazed. Steve went very still for a moment when Bucky pressed inside, still enough that Bucky knew he needed to adjust, so he just waited, too.

It was easier to control himself from this end, for whatever reason -- or rather, for reasons he didn't want to think about too hard or for too long. Instead of thinking, he stared down at Steve, who was worrying his lower lip with his teeth and sliding a hand down in between them and circling it around his own cock. "Hey now," said Bucky, slightly hoarse, and Steve's eyes snapped open again and his hips moved a little, which Bucky took as permission to start fucking him.

Everything devolved very fast from there on out. Bucky wondered why on earth he had applied the term 'control' to either of them in this situation, because it rapidly ended up with both of them crying out and clinging onto each other -- or rather, Steve holding onto the headboard so that the force of Bucky's thrusts didn't drive him into the wall, and Bucky holding onto Steve's hip and thigh with enough pressure that he could tell he was leaving bruises.

Steve went rigid, thrashing against the bed a little, twisting the sheets up beneath him, and came with probably the highest-pitched noise Bucky had ever heard him make. Bucky felt it more than he saw it, against his stomach, a hot spurt, and then Steve was kissing all over Bucky's chin and neck and even down to his shoulders, and Bucky's thrusts lost their rhythm completely as he came too.

Steve flopped back against the bed and Bucky lay down on top of him, Steve's limbs all sprawled around him, and they stayed that way for a couple of minutes until Bucky started to get uncomfortable and pulled out. There were red marks on Steve's left hip and right thigh that would undoubtedly purple into bruises and then fade almost as quickly as they'd come, and Bucky touched them, pressing his thumb against one.

"Ow," said Steve, without any heat.

Bucky looked at him, curious, and pressed a little harder, and Steve's glance turned sharp, and then he looked away again, closing his eyes. "I don't know if I have the energy to go again right now," he confided to Bucky. He _did_ sound embarrassed now, definitely so.

It made Bucky wonder, because Steve was always so kind to him when he was feeling down. If Steve could be embarrassed that he hadn't slept well last night, how the fuck must he think of Bucky? And then he had to shut that train of thought down before it meandered any further, because he knew exactly where it led. "I'll make some coffee," he said to Steve instead, reaching over to smooth Steve's hair, pressing a kiss to Steve's forehead as he rolled out of bed.

He took the plate into the kitchen and put some water on to boil, and sat staring out the window. It had snowed overnight and the whole city was grey and white. It never looked that cold to him when there was snow on the ground, not really; it had always struck him as a sort of blanket, and he remembered being surprised a few times in the past, when he'd gone outside and found it bitter instead.

+++

Steve got up and took a shower after that, and then he said he needed to get out of the house for a while. The way he said it made it pretty clear to Bucky that he needed some time alone, probably to brood and wander around aimlessly - it had been a favored Steve Rogers pastime in the Brooklyn of the past, although Bucky hoped this time around Steve wouldn't be out looking for a fight. He had been able to get away with it back then, barely, usually with Bucky dragging him out by the skin of his teeth, but these days he was too well-known to be brawling in back alleys without it turning into a catastrophe.

Anyway, Bucky let him go, and sat down at his computer, opening it up to look up recipes for dinner, or, that failing, maybe a nice restaurant nearby that they hadn't tried yet. He wanted to do something nice for Steve -- in a way, it was his fault that Steve was wound so tight.

When he opened the laptop, there was something on his desktop that hadn't been there before, sitting right at the bottom right corner of where all the icons were neatly lined up. It was a video file, the filename a simple date-and-timestamp. Bucky stared at it for about a minute solid, and then he clicked on it and waited for his video player to pop up and play it.

It started with Steve setting the plate of waffles aside. Bucky's back was to the camera, and the expression on Steve's face here looked strangely different than it had to Bucky, from this angle, strangely determined. He watched himself on the video, his hair falling forward against Steve's skin as he kissed Steve's face, neck, shoulders. Steve sliding his hand into Bucky's sweatpants, the way Bucky's whole body reacted to it on the screen. He hadn't known that --

It was strange. Bucky had watched plenty of videos of himself; they had recovered some from Hydra, some ill-advised recordings that had been, or should have been, destined for deletion and had never made it there. Bucky's paper trail tended to be quite small, as he was meant to be untraceable, a non-entity making his mark on the world and then disappearing again, so he took what he could get in terms of tangible records of the seventy years he had lost to them. When they had found the videos, he had asked to see them for that very reason.

He'd discovered, though, that they didn't trigger any sort of real emotion or memory, at least not while he was watching them. Instead it was as if he was watching someone else, some kind of vacant, blank automaton, disassemble and reassemble firearms, run a nearly-impossible obstacle course, get on his knees without question in front of some nameless Hydra technician. The only thing it lit inside him was a sort of cold calm, the feeling he had always sought to retreat into when he was the asset.

This was -- completely different. There was nothing cold or calm about it, and Bucky and Steve were both so clearly themselves in the video that there was a moment where Bucky thought, _maybe this is when I'm the most myself, this is the only time._ He would have thought it would be strange, off-putting, watching yourself fuck, but he found himself watching Steve's face - the expression reminded him of a statue he'd seen, or maybe only seen a picture of, once, a sort of agonized ecstasy that seemed too complex and fleeting to give a concise name to.

He watched the video all the way through. It wasn't that long -- sex was rarely as long as it felt when you were doing it. It ended right when Steve flopped back onto the bed with Bucky mostly on top of him, so there was none of the strange moment that had happened after that, and Bucky thought he was grateful for that, because that, he didn't want to watch.

He had a strange, nervous feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he'd gotten hard watching it. He licked his lips; it felt like he _shouldn't_ jerk off, and instead of touching himself he curled and uncurled the fingers of the left hand, all the plates settling and resettling.

JARVIS had done it, of course. He had done it without being asked and he had left it here for Bucky to find, and Bucky didn't understand any of JARVIS's protocols or processes well enough to say exactly why he had done it. There were a multitude of options and it could have been any of them, or none. Maybe JARVIS wanted Bucky to see himself and Steve the way JARVIS saw them; maybe he was offering it as a comfort. Maybe it was something more perverse than that.

The simplest solution would be just to ask JARVIS, but Bucky didn't feel like doing that either. He closed the video and left it exactly where it was instead, and then opened the web browser, except that he had almost forgotten what he was doing in the first place and it took him a solid thirty seconds to remember that he had wanted to make dinner.

In the end, he decided on a salmon dish, and e-mailed himself a list of the ingredients to get at the grocery store. And that was where he found himself, at the meat counter, picking up the bright red fillets of salmon in their shrink-wrapped package, his mind turning over and over the way that Steve's face had looked in the recording when he said Bucky's name.


	4. pretty good

The gallery opening was on a Friday night. It was, perhaps ironically, the coldest day of the year so far, and Steve spent the entire day worrying verbally and nonverbally about every aspect of it, despite the fact that he'd already been down to the gallery, seen the setup and met Chioma, and had told Bucky afterwards that it had gone really well.

Steve put on a dark blue suit with a sort of almost-metallic sheen to it that night, and he looked so good in it that Bucky wondered how on earth he was going to be able to keep his hands off Steve all evening, but he didn't try anything. Steve was wound up tight as it was and Bucky knew him well enough to know that any of Bucky's bullshit wasn't going to make him feel any better.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking down, as they waited for the car in the lobby, and Bucky went over to him and gently straightened his tie. Nothing he could say would really make a difference, not to somebody as stubborn as Steve, but. "It's going to be great," said Bucky, "and I'm proud. Now get ready to smile for about four hours straight, okay?"

Steve's mouth quirked up at the corners and he reached up to touch Bucky's hand where it rested flat against his shirt. "Okay," he said, and then the car pulled up, and they got into it, and drove over to Chelsea.

The opening had hardly even technically started, but there were a lot of people waiting to go in, and next to Bucky, Steve inhaled and exhaled sharply as the car pulled up. Bucky looked over curiously at him and watched him, the way that his face changed. His expression was so clearly inwardly-focused, brows drawn together and mouth slightly turned down, and then abruptly everything shifted, and Steve was smiling blindingly, his chin tilted up and his shoulders squared, as they got out of the car.

Bucky knew it pretty well. It was a change he had a lot of practice with, himself, and he pasted a smile on his own face as he slid out behind Steve, the best smile he owned - it wasn't a clean, heroic smile like Steve's, more like a sly grin, more pleased with himself than he had any right to be.

They went into the gallery, where there was a crowd already milling around. It was Bucky's first time seeing the paintings in the space - they looked so different, set against the clean white walls, professionally framed - but he couldn't exactly see them all for all the bodies. His nerves buzzed a little, and Steve's hand touched the small of his back, guiding him toward where he spotted Chioma wearing a fantastically architectural black dress, smiling and talking with a couple of people.

She lifted her hand and gave a small wave when she spotted them. The crowd was sort of parting for them; people just instinctually got out of Steve's way, and it almost made Bucky laugh, because of how different it was from how people had reacted to Steve's presence when he'd been smaller. "Hello," Chioma said, "Steve, James, glad you made it over. What do you think?"

"Everything looks great," said Bucky; he couldn't think of anything else to say. Even when he'd imagined it being busy, he hadn't imagined -- this many people, crowding around all the paintings. The volume of the gallery was loud enough that he had to raise his voice to be heard.

"It really does," Steve said. "I can't thank you enough; this is all fantastic. I guess if I had to say that I had a dream back before the war, this would have been it, and --" he spread his hands. "Here we are. It's wonderful."

Bucky could hear the slight self-censoring in Steve's words; he was turning them appropriate, slightly antiseptic, and Bucky wondered when Steve had learned that - even in the war he hadn't been so good at saying the right thing at the right time, so it must have happened sometime after 2010, sometime in this new age when someone was always listening. And it wasn't that anyone but Bucky would have noticed it, but Bucky knew Steve, really knew him, and he couldn't decide if he was irritated that Steve _had_ to change his own words before they came out, or if he was just grateful that he still got to see the raw, unaltered form of Steve.

"Well, I think we should be thanking Mr. Barnes and Miss Potts for bringing your work to my attention, too," Chioma said. "And, of course, your work itself. I can't take all the credit, as much as I would like to." She smiled, her teeth very white. "Can I introduce you to a few people?"

"Of course," Steve said, "It'd be my pleasure," and Bucky couldn't stifle a chuckle, because he was pretty sure everyone here knew who Steve was, but -- Chioma put her hand on Steve's shoulder and he gave Bucky a slightly apologetic look and let himself be led away.

Bucky didn't mind; he walked around the gallery as best he could, looking at the paintings in their new context. People looked at him but nobody really said anything to him, and he took advantage while he could, because he was sure that eventually someone would be curious enough to talk to him.

"James!" said a familiar voice over the din, and he turned to see Pepper coming toward him, cutting through the crowd just like Steve had, with Tony at her side. She came right over and gave him an enormous hug, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing. "This is amazing!"

She pulled back, and Bucky smiled at her and then at Tony, reaching to shake Tony's hand. "I'm so happy for Steve," Pepper said. "The work looks _fantastic_ , look at the number of people here."

"I'm almost jealous not to be the center of attention," said Tony, "Except I'm also totally not at all." He nodded his head to indicate where Steve was now surrounded by a radius of people all trying to talk to him, and then his keen-eyed gaze was searching around the room, and he gave a little whistle. "I had no clue Rogers was a hidden artistic genius."

"Yeah, he's been interested in art for as long as I can remember," Bucky said. "As for not knowing, I wouldn't feel too guilty if I were you. I don't think there's anybody alive except for me who really knew the extent of it. Well, until now, anyway."

"Oh, I'm not guilty," Tony said. "Just fascinated. It's a weird combination of interests. Painting nudes and punching Hitler. I'm gonna go look."

He wandered off into the crowd, his presence attracting another flurry of excited attention, and Bucky turned back to Pepper, who he saw was wearing the plum-colored dress that she'd bought on their first shopping trip. "Hey, this dress," he said. "You look great."

"So do you," Pepper said, and then, "How are you doing? Was he nervous?"

Bucky glanced over at Steve, and laughed. "He was about to crawl out of his own skin," he said. "But I think he's all right now." Or he would be until somebody said something weird to him about one of the pictures, no doubt.

"Well, I won't say he doesn't have anything to be nervous about, but there's always _something,_ " Pepper said, laying her hand on Bucky's arm and giving a little squeeze. "Come on, let's go get a glass of wine. I bet you're proud."

"You have no idea," Bucky said, heading with her over to the temporary bar that had been set up at the back of the gallery. She ordered a glass of white wine and so he did the same, taking one and handing it to her after the bartender had poured them, laughing when she clinked her glass against his.

"It was a really thoughtful thing of you to do," Pepper said, smiling fondly in Steve's general direction as Bucky began to notice more and more people looking at him with blatant curiosity. "Steve's lucky to have a friend like you, you know."

Bucky smirked at her. "I don't know, I did shoot him three times," he said, and she snorted and smacked his arm, and then started to walk around the gallery with Bucky next to her. People didn't move out of the way for her _quite_ the same way that they did for Steve, but there was something similar there. Maybe more impressive for the fact that Pepper was nowhere near as physically imposing as Steve was now - it was all just her presence that did it.

"Hey," Tony said, coming up behind them eventually as Pepper stopped to look at one of the cityscapes, a view looking up, the tops of buildings, trees, and the sky. "So are we going to buy one of these for our collection, Pep? Because I'm particularly partial to the one of Barnes in bed all 'draw me like one of your French girls.' Nice ass, Barnes."

"Thanks," Bucky said. "Squats, lots of squats. I can teach you, if you want."

"I don't know, I think my ass already attracts way too much attention as it is," Tony said. "Whoa, you guys went and got wine while I was looking? Should I be offended?"

"It's an open bar, Tony," Pepper said, and then smiled as someone came up to ask Tony for his autograph. "Are Sam and Natasha coming, too?" she asked as Tony went through the whole routine, signing his name with a flourish.

"Sam is," Bucky answered. "I didn't get a firm answer from Nat, but, you know, Natasha. I'm not sure if she's already gone; Coulson had her going on a mission sometime in the next week or so."

"I hope she can make it." Pepper turned to look at the portrait of Natasha where it stared out eerily from its spot on the wall. "She'd really like this. I think she'd be happy to see Steve getting recognized for his work, too."

"Yeah, I think you're right," Bucky said. "I know she'd at least like to see the portrait, because she stopped by to ask about it about a week ago. She's seen a picture, but, well."

"Pictures aren't the same as seeing the real thing." Pepper smiled. "I know."

Bucky started to say something else, but was gently interrupted by someone at his elbow. He turned around to find a small man with neat grey hair and glasses. "I'm sorry to bother you in the middle of a conversation," he said, "But I want to tell you that you make a fantastic subject, and I heard from Chioma that you were the one who got the ball rolling on this exhibition, so I wanted to say I appreciate that, too."

"Thank you," Bucky said, and then, shifting his wine glass into his left hand and reaching out with his right, "James Barnes."

"Matthew Leitman," said the man, shaking Bucky's hand with a firm grip. "I'm adjunct faculty over at NYU; I specialize in World War II-era advertising and propaganda, so Captain Rogers -- and you, I should say -- have been an interest of mine for quite some time."

Bucky couldn't help but laugh a little, because it was funny that he and Steve were both matters of the contemporary world and of history, but it was true enough. "Thank you for coming," he said. "I'm glad you like the paintings. I'm sure there's a lot here that you don't get a good sense for from the official accounts of things."

"Yes, absolutely," Leitman agreed. "It's really a unique situation, being able to get a fresh perspective from someone who is well-known as a propaganda object and a historical figure, and I'm -- I feel very privileged to be able to witness it."

"Have you talked to Steve yet?" Bucky asked. "I'm sure he'd be happy to hear you say so."

Leitman glanced in Steve's direction with some trepidation, and Bucky almost laughed again, but that would have been cruel. "Oh, no, not yet," he said, and Steve was busy, but --

"I'll introduce you to him when his throng of admirers has thinned a little bit," said Bucky. "Would you tell me about your areas of study? I've done a lot of reading in the past few months, but I'm sure you've done a lot more, and I'd be interested to hear what you've got to say."

They got into a conversation about Steve, of course; Bucky was probably the world's foremost goddamn expert on Steve Rogers, and Leitman had a lot of interesting things to say about Steve's ability to revise his own place in history and his image in the eye of the public. A few people came over and sort of started listening in, and then a couple of them joined in the conversation - an art critic, and a lawyer who said that she was a gay rights activist.

Bucky managed to hold his own, somehow, despite the fact that these were all people who had had a hell of a lot more schooling than him. He didn't quite know what to say at certain points, because the lawyer, especially, tended to talk about Steve like he was an object, or at least like he was someone who wasn't really here, but he did his best, and nobody seemed to notice if anything wasn't right about him or what he was saying.

He lost track of Steve at some point, and while he was looking around he saw a bewildered-looking Sam come in the door of the gallery, and next to him the bright red flag of Natasha's hair. "Excuse me," he said politely to the little group, and then, shaking Leitman's hand again, "It was a pleasure to meet you. Don't leave before I've introduced you to Steve, all right?"

He squeezed through the crowd, and Sam grinned and shouted "Barnes!" as soon as he saw Bucky, waving, while Natasha looked dryly amused at his side.

Sam, of course, gave Bucky a hug as soon as he got close enough, and then Natasha reluctantly did the same thing. "I'm glad you could come," Bucky said to her, as quietly as he could manage without his voice getting lost in the din, and when he pulled away her expression was quietly pleased. "Uh. Tony and Pepper are already here somewhere. Steve's -- I'm not sure, I lost him when I was talking to some people, but obviously he's here somewhere too. I'll go find him if you two want to have a look around."

"This is crazy," said Sam, and then, "Shit, yes, I want to have a look around." Bucky left them to it and went to find Steve, who was upstairs talking to the other artist, the photographer.

He looked totally relieved to see Bucky for a second, and Bucky went over and put a hand on his arm. "Sam and Natasha are here," Bucky said. "And there's a guy you should meet, I think it'd make his decade."

Steve visibly perked at the sound of Sam and Natasha's names. "Excuse me," he said to the photographer; her floor seemed just as busy as downstairs, so Bucky imagined she was plenty pleased to be sharing a billing with Steve. "It was nice to meet you. Your work is great, congratulations," and then he followed Bucky down, not saying anything, but his hand on the small of Bucky's back. Bucky turned to look at him for a moment and smiled.

Sam spotted them and waved from within the crowd, and they made their way over. "Jesus, Rogers," he said. He had his hands in his pockets and was turning slightly, like he was trying to get a view of it all at once. "You must be pretty excited."

"I had no idea people would be this interested," Steve said.

"Of course he didn't," Bucky said, standing close enough to Steve that their shoulders touched; he could feel Steve's nervousness, still, but now it was tempered by a more positive emotion, the excitement that came with this kind of success. A good old adrenaline rush, a feeling Steve Rogers had always been a junkie for. 

"It's really good," Natasha said from beside Sam, almost angrily. "It's really good, Steve."

"She's right," Sam said. "It's amazing, Steve. Congratulations, man."

Steve looked flustered, and just said, "Thank you," and Bucky touched his back lightly and went to go find Leitman, who tried to protest that he didn't want to bother Steve, but came over with Bucky anyway. Natasha was just standing and staring at the painting of herself, Sam grinning beside her, and Steve hadn't been devoured by the crowd again just yet.

"Hey," Bucky said, and Steve turned. "This is Matthew Leitman. He teaches some classes on World War II at NYU. Dr. Leitman, Steve Rogers."

"Nice to meet you," said Steve, sticking out a hand. Leitman said, "It's an honor," like he was about to pass out, and Bucky couldn't help but smile.

They got into a conversation pretty easily without much help from Bucky, and Bucky floated around the gallery at the periphery of people's attention for -- a while. Eventually Natasha came up and said, "I have to get going. The mission actually starts tonight, and I need to get ready, but -- will you tell him I said thanks?"

"I will," Bucky said. "And then you tell him yourself, when you get back. I'm sure he'd let you have the painting if you wanted."

Natasha glanced back over at the portrait. "I didn't think he really knew me at all," she said, licking her lips. "I mean, I work pretty hard at being an unknown entity. But I guess I was wrong."

"Steve has a way of getting under people's skins whether we like it or not," Bucky said. "You want to be friends with him, you better get used to it." He touched her shoulder and then pulled her in again for a gentle hug, telegraphing his motion even as she remained slightly stiff against him. Feeling inexplicably fond, he kissed the top of her head, and then let her go. "Good luck on the mission. Stay safe."

"I always do," Natasha said, smirking, which was a goddamn lie, but. "Goodnight, Barnes."

"Da svedanya," said Bucky, and then watched her as she turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Eventually the crowd started to thin, and then it was just mostly people they knew left in the gallery - Barton showed up late, with Banner in tow, Coulson and Hill both dropped in for a little while, and some other people whose names Bucky didn't know but whose faces were familiar from around the tower. By the time it really emptied, it was almost one in the morning, and Bucky was, frankly, exhausted, even if he was still riding a wave of excitement.

He couldn't tell if Steve had finally pushed through the anxiety or if Steve was still just doing a fantastic job at pretending confidence and poise. Either way - it didn't matter; Steve seemed happy and Bucky, as always, was prepared to deal with any eventuality.

"You guys going out after this?" Sam asked. Bucky had watched him and Steve earlier, over by the portrait of Sam that Steve had painted - there had been this moment of naked, earnest gratitude on Sam's face, and it made Bucky feel good to watch Steve realizing that he was the cause for it. Sometimes - often - Steve didn't realize what he meant to people, and equally as often he tried to downplay it when he could, but if there was anyone who wouldn't let him get away with that particular bullshit, it was Sam Wilson, and Bucky had his own earnest gratitude to Sam for that.

Steve glanced at Bucky, and Bucky kept his expression as neutral as he could. Sure, he was tired, but he'd go out with Steve if Steve wanted to go out. He wasn't at the end of his reserves yet, and he'd had a lot of years practicing pushing himself past even the point of running on fumes. And fuck it, it was Steve's night.

"Maybe another night," Steve said finally, running a hand through his hair. He still looked perfect, just a little flushed now with happiness and excitement. "I feel like once the adrenaline wears off I'm going to want to be face down in bed very quickly."

"I get that," Sam said. "I'm just glad it's a weekend, 'cause technically I'm way past my bedtime already. What about tomorrow, you guys want to go grab some drinks tomorrow night?"

"You realize you're talking to maybe the only two people on the planet who physically _can't_ get drunk, right?" Bucky asked, and Sam made a face at him.

"Fine, Grandpa," Sam said. "You can have cranberry cocktail then. You know that's not what I meant, anyway, going to the bar is about way more than drinking."

"True," Bucky said, "but from what I remember, back in _my_ day, the drinking helped the rest of it along." He thought of one Christmas when he and Steve had gotten fairly trashed and then decided that they ought to go to Mass that evening anyway; he remembered himself listing against Steve, whispering "I can't feel my face, Steve, I can't feel my face," while Steve tried not to laugh loud enough to attract the priest's attention and failed miserably.

"Back in _your_ day," Steve said, "I seem to remember you were more interested in dancing and flirting than drinking anyway. Sure, Sam, I'm up for it."

"See, Rogers, this is why I like you," Sam said, but he was grinning and Bucky knew he was teasing. "Okay, let's say about nine tomorrow night, then? Meet at the tower?"

Steve glanced at Bucky and shrugged. "Sure," he said. Bucky refrained from making any kind of verbal commitment to it; one of the first lessons he'd learned about this new version of himself was that it was easier just not to say anything than to say yes and have to back out of it later.

Sam and the others said their goodnights to Bucky and Steve, and Bucky and Steve said their goodbyes and thanks to Chioma, and then they went outside to wait for the car, which Bucky immediately realized was a bad decision. There weren't any photographers left or anything like that, but it was goddamn _cold_. He glanced over his shoulder back inside and saw Chioma walking around, the bartender and catering staff cleaning up, and when Steve met his eyes he knew they would have both felt guilty if they'd just waltzed back in.

Bucky just stood with his shoulders around his ears, instead, hands shoved into his pockets until Steve reached out to take one of them. Steve, the bastard, didn't seem nearly as cold as Bucky was, and he was smiling when Bucky looked at him.

The car pulled up after only a couple of minutes anyway, and they got into the back of it, Steve looking back toward the gallery a little reluctantly, in a way that sort of answered Bucky's question from earlier: He was looking at it with that wistful look that he often gave to things he'd thought very beautiful and very perfect and regretted having to leave. Bucky had seen him give Peggy Carter that look, during the war. "You had a good time," he said to Steve, and Steve's gaze snapped back to him.

"I did," Steve said. "People were -- people were _awfully_ nice." He paused, and then, the corner of his mouth quirking up, "Nobody asked me anything weird about you, either."

Bucky laughed. "Me neither," he said, "So I guess we just got really lucky, or Pepper threatened to sue everyone beforehand."

"That would be pretty hard to pre-screen for," Steve said, wry.

"I'm sure for you she'd manage," Bucky replied. He looked at Steve for a moment. "I'm proud of you," he said. It came out quieter than he'd meant it, but, well.

Steve smiled, and for a second looked like he was about to say something, but he must have thought better of it, or just couldn't find the words, because instead he just leaned in and kissed Bucky instead, his hands coming up on either side of Bucky's face. Bucky kissed him back and by the time they got back home, Steve was definitely red in the face, Bucky's mouth felt swollen, and he'd bet dollars to donuts that he wasn't the only one whose pants were feeling a lot tighter than they had been ten minutes ago.

They walked in and to the elevator about as fast as they could while still maintaining even a shred of dignity, and once they were in the elevator, they were kissing again; Bucky blearily watched his reflection and Steve's in the mirrored walls, the sweetness of Steve's eyes-closed concentrating expression as he licked inside Bucky's mouth, the carefulness of his hands on Bucky's body, and thought to himself about the cameras, how they would look on the cameras, if JARVIS was watching -- he must be -- or if his processes were occupied elsewhere.

Steve had Bucky's shirt untucked and half-unbuttoned by the time they got up to their apartment, and Bucky took hold of both of his wrists for a moment, pulling his hands away. Steve got a questioning look on his face until Bucky stepped back just far enough to see the whole picture of him, head to toe. He certainly wasn't pristine anymore, his tie askew and his hair mussed, but it didn't matter. He was still a present Bucky wanted like hell to unwrap, and if he had his way about it he was going to take his sweet time doing it.

He put one finger in Steve's belt loop and tugged gently, walking Steve toward the bedroom. Once they'd made it there, he pushed Steve to sit, getting in between Steve's knees and undoing his shoes, pulling them off one by one. He slid his hands up Steve's legs, along his thighs, undoing Steve's belt and his pants and unzipping them, opening the fly. Steve groaned when he leaned in to nuzzle at Steve's dick through his underwear, and he smiled a little, mouthing Steve's erection through the thin fabric.

Steve lifted up so Bucky could get his pants and underwear down, his hand sliding into Bucky's hair, heavy against Bucky's skull. He gasped out Bucky's name when Bucky sucked him down, his hips arching forward, and Bucky let him, let him have what he wanted. He stayed sitting up, but barely, and when Bucky looked up at him, he had that contorted almost-pain expression that meant he was really enjoying himself. _The Ecstasy of St. Teresa,_ Bucky remembered. That had been the sculpture. The arrow, about to pierce her --

Steve said, breathless, "Bucky, I'm gonna --" and Bucky worked his tongue against Steve and sucked harder, encouraging. Steve's cock jerked in his mouth, pulsing, and he opened his mouth and his eyes as he came, but it didn't look to Bucky like he was really seeing anything.

He waited until the tension had bled out of Steve's body and then pulled away, licking his lips, and Steve lay back on the bed, still completely dressed except for the fact that his shoes were off and his pants were around his thighs. He looked perfect, ruined like this. It made Bucky feel hungry inside, looking at Steve's pink face and his mouth still hanging open, panting softly.

"Come up here," Steve said after a moment, and Bucky kicked off his own shoes and went, straddling Steve. Steve put his hands on Bucky's thighs and sat up on his elbows, leaning forward enough that Bucky understood his intentions and bent to kiss him.

"I want to fuck you," Steve said against Bucky's mouth, undoing Bucky's pants and sliding his hand inside, and Bucky shuddered.

"You gotta get hard again first," he said, his hips pitching forward as Steve's palm rubbed against him. If Steve kept _that_ up --

"Mmm," Steve said, "give me just a minute, and --" he reached into the bedside table, finding the bottle of lube by touch, squirted some out, slid his hand inside Bucky's underwear.

It was a tight fit with Bucky's pants and underwear still mostly on, but somehow Steve managed to get two fingers inside Bucky, and by the time Steve did get hard again, Bucky was practically to the point of begging. He didn't know what it was - if it was the adrenaline, or the exhaustion, or the fucking _suit_ , or some combination of all of the above.

He pulled away just long enough to yank his pants _off_ , feeling a little crazy when he caught sight of Steve's face and realized that Steve had been watching him just as keenly as he'd been watching Steve a few minutes ago. "God," he said, barely recognizing his own voice, and took ahold of Steve's cock, sliding down onto him.

Steve's hands landed on Bucky's thighs again, squeezing, and Bucky started to move. Steve echoed him, his hips canting up, and Bucky stared down at him until he couldn't stand it anymore. Nobody had any idea, he thought very clearly to himself; none at all.

It didn't last very long. Bucky was too wound-up from some combination of exhilaration and exhaustion, and almost as soon as he came, Steve did too, as if echoing Bucky, the orgasm coaxed out of him by Bucky's body. Steve was still nearly completely dressed, and Bucky barely managed to avoid getting come all over him, a stain which either of them would surely have rued trying to explain to the dry-cleaner. The thought made him laugh, a laugh with the slightest hysterical edge to it.

Steve grinned, reaching for a tissue to clean both of them up a little, and then carefully undoing his tie and the buttons on his shirt. "Thank you," he said, his back mostly turned, "for tonight."

"You're welcome," Bucky said, finishing unbuttoning his shirt from where Steve had started in the elevator, getting out of bed on slightly shaky legs and taking his suit and Steve's and hanging them back up where they belonged. He felt momentarily overwhelmed by everything, a feeling not helped by the intensity with which Steve's gaze caught him as he climbed back in bed.

"I really mean it," Steve said. His jaw set; that determined look. So goddamn stubborn. "I'm -- I think I'm the luckiest man alive."

 _Not hardly,_ thought Bucky, neither of them were by a long shot. But it was a good thought, for Steve, a sweet thought, and there weren't enough of those in the world as it was, so he'd be damned if he was going to take it away.

+++

He woke up the next morning to the smell of coffee, and, when he opened his eyes, Steve coming into the bedroom carrying two steaming mugs. "Shoot," said Steve. "I woke you up, didn't I?"

"Coffee did," Bucky said, sitting up and running his hand through his hair, reaching for the mug Steve offered him. Steve slid back into bed and Bucky shivered a little, relishing the extra body heat as he curled his fingers around the cup of coffee. "Time 's it?"

"Around nine," Steve said, grinning. "We kind of slept in."

Bucky mouthed 'wow' silently, making his eyes and mouth big and round and raising his eyebrows as far as they would go. It had the desired effect of making Steve laugh, and Bucky sipped at his coffee appreciatively.

"How're you feeling?" Steve asked eventually, and Bucky gauged it. He felt slightly tired, but not overwhelmingly, and that Steve had woken him up in such an obviously good mood meant that any buzz of anxiety he might have felt was pleasantly muted.

"I feel pretty good," he said, reaching over and rubbing his knuckle against Steve's cheekbone, affectionately. "What about you? How're you feeling?"

Steve looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said, "I feel good. I think -- proud. I feel proud." Bucky could certainly understand why; being Captain America was something that Steve did and did well, but the paintings were a more intimate expression of him by far, not least because painting had been something that Steve was born with the talent for, rather than having it -- the physical part of it, anyway -- gifted to him courtesy of a serum.

"Well, you ought to," Bucky said. "I'm proud _of_ you." He took a swallow of coffee. "And thanks for the coffee, too."

They spent about another hour in bed, finishing their coffee and then making out, and then -- well. When they got up to shower, Bucky remembered that Steve had said he'd go out with Sam that night, and when he reminded Steve of it, Steve asked, "You, too?"

Bucky slicked his wet hair out of his face and thought about it for a moment. "I think so," he said finally. "But ask me closer to when the time comes, all right?"

It was easiest to beg off going places where it was liable to be crowded, dark, and loud; Steve understood that without a second's hesitation. Bucky was vaguely grateful that this was going to be one of those situations, so he wouldn't have to feel foolish for turning down a trip to lunch, or a quiet afternoon in the park. Truthfully it usually had little to do with the details of the situation - there were certain things that were more stressful than others, but dark, crowded, or loud rarely had too much to do with them. It was usually specifics that set Bucky off, details he couldn't possibly hope to catalog exhaustively enough to escape them all. Specifics, or a general lack of attention to when he was feeling stretched-thin, like his skin was pulled too tight over his bones.

The way it ended up, he didn't actually have to beg off at all. By the time nine o'clock rolled around, Bucky still felt fine, and the hopeful look Steve gave him was enough for him to agree to it. They met Sam in the lobby of the building, which made Bucky wonder for a second where Sam was staying, if not at the tower, and took one of the ever-present Stark Industries fleet over to the bar.

They got a little table over in the corner and Sam and Steve both ordered beers. Bucky had a whiskey, for appearances' sake, and vaguely listened in on the conversation Sam and Steve were having about Sam's sister while he scanned the entire bar, looking over the crowd of people, finding the exits. There was nothing to be worried about, and, satisfied, he turned back to Sam and Steve, tuning in on their conversation more attentively.

"What about you guys?" Sam asked. "What are you doing for Christmas?"

Steve and Bucky glanced at each other and shrugged. "Tony's, um, gala is coming up," Steve said, spitting out the word 'gala' like it was vaguely offensive to him. "Other than that, I don't know." He looked at Bucky again. "I suppose we ought to go visit Peggy. We haven't seen her in a while, and it's -- it would be a good idea."

 _It might be her last Christmas,_ Bucky thought. "We didn't used to do a lot even before the war anyway," he said. "Too poor. Might need Tony to give us some tips on how to properly celebrate the holiday season."

"Yeah, what did we -- we would usually just save up and go out for drinks," Steve said. "Oh, and there was the time that we decided to go to Mass drunk, after which I was in more fear for my immortal soul than I had been before we went to Mass in the first place."

Bucky grinned, and Sam laughed, then pretended to be scandalized. "This doesn't sound like the government-approved version of the Captain America story," he said. "Don't worry, I'm sure you guys will get more than your share of holiday spirit from Tony. Did he try and rope you into dressing up as Santa to give toys to sick kids?"

"Yes!" Steve said. "Don't tell me he sent that e-mail to all of us. I agreed to it! Well, the giving toys to sick kids."

"Shit, me too," Sam said. "And then I found out from Bruce that he sent Bruce the same damn e-mail."

"I didn't get any e-mail," Bucky said, deadpan, his expression blank and empty. "Didn't he think those poor sick kids would want to see my smiling face?"

Steve chortled. "I'll have to follow up with him on that," he said. "I mean, you're _sort of_ an Avenger."

" _Sort of_ \--" Bucky said, cuffing the back of Steve's head.

"Whoa, whoa, break it up," Sam said, laughing. "All right, I'm going for another round, you guys want one?"

"Sure," said Steve, and Bucky shook his head, watching Sam make his way through the crowd over to the bar, and then turning back to Steve.

"I gotta admit it would be something else seeing you in a Santa costume," he said, and Steve gave a sneaky little grin.

"Well, I'm not doing it so Tony can make fun of me," Steve said, "but I suppose I'm not entirely opposed to the idea. I don't think I can grow an impressive enough beard, though. Certainly not in time."

"Disappointing," Bucky said, reaching out and cupping both smooth sides of Steve's face in his hands, running his finger along Steve's jaw and watching the pleased blush that followed in its wake.

"At least I _can_ grow a beard now," Steve said. "I don't think I had a hope in hell before the serum."

Bucky shrugged. "I could have grown enough stubble for both of us back then," he said. "Besides, you look nice clean-shaven." He smirked. "Wholesome."

" _Wholesome,_ " Steve repeated, still with that little grin on his face, and Bucky could feel his own grin widening in answer. This wasn't so bad, he thought. The bar was crowded enough that nobody seemed to really be paying attention to them, and it was loud, but there was music, and the cacophony of all those people talking and laughing sounded almost good to Bucky after so many years without any of it.

He glanced over to the bar and saw Sam talking to a pretty girl with long, straight hair that looked, in the light, to be pastel blue, or maybe purple. Sam spotted him looking and gave a small wave of acknowledgement, and a minute later grabbed the two beers that the bartender slid across the counter and brought them back over to the table, passing one to Steve but not sitting down. "She wants to dance with me," he said, "so I'm gonna go dance with her. You guys should think about it too."

"Steve's not a dancer," Bucky said, before Steve had a chance to give his characteristic protest.

Sam laughed. "Bullshit," he said. "Everybody's a dancer, Rogers, all you have to do is move your body and act like nobody else is paying attention." He took a pull off his beer and set it down on the table, clapped Steve on the shoulder and said, "Well, you'll know where to find me," before turning back into the crowd.

Bucky looked at Steve, who looked -- tempted, surprisingly. "You know I could teach you to dance," Bucky said. "I'd be _happy_ to teach you to dance. And anyway what they're doing isn't anything nearly as complicated as we used to do back then." He glanced over at the crowd of people packed together dancing. "It's kind of just humping with your clothes on."

Steve laughed. "Well, that I do know how to do," he said, turning his beer bottle around in a circle on the table and glancing over his shoulder at the people dancing too. "I don't know," he said. "I don't even have getting drunk as an excuse now, you know."

Bucky snorted. "Nobody here knows us except Sam," he said. "And Sam already makes fun of you, so I don't see the harm in adding one more piece of kindling to that fire."

Steve downed the rest of his beer, as if it was actually going to do anything for him, and squared his shoulders, looking hilariously like Captain America for a moment with the determined expression on his face. "Okay," he said.

"Really?" Bucky asked, genuinely surprised, ready to have just been talked down again. He finished up his own drink too, and stood up, hoping their table wouldn't be nabbed if they all left.

"Don't ask me 'really' or I'm just going to change my mind," Steve said. "I think I had everyone thinking I was too dignified to dance. This could just ruin everything."

"You, dignified," Bucky replied, lacing his fingers through Steve's and pushing into the crowd. "That's a laugh if I ever heard one, Rogers."

There might have been a couple of people who gave them a second look as they passed by, but it didn't matter; nobody bothered them. Bucky got Steve into the crush of people, and it turned out they couldn't even see Sam, and only the hair of the girl he was dancing with, so if Steve had been worried about Sam making fun of his dance moves, he was in the clear. He turned Steve toward himself and Steve stood for a second looking tremendously awkward. "Come on, I know you know how to do this," Bucky said, pulling Steve close and rolling his hips.

Steve's body now was a lot different than Steve's body had been back then - probably the last time he tried to dance - and it was funny to Bucky, that Steve trusted it to do a lot of other things for him it had never been able to do before, but not this. He knew Steve's fighting style intimately, and he knew the complicated choreography that went into every punch, every kick, so why should this not be the same? It was. It was all a dance, one way or another, and Bucky saw the second that Steve had that realization himself, put his arms around Bucky, and just let his body do what it wanted.

It was too hot and people kept running into them, and Steve wasn't a great dancer by any stretch of the imagination, but it felt good. Nobody was paying them any attention. They didn't matter - it felt like being insignificant, in the best way possible, because it felt almost like being normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The soundtrack for this story can now be found [here](http://www.4shared.com/zip/eLYDGJMPba/all_eyes_on_you.html) for download! And, as usual, you can find me [here on tumblr.](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thank you for reading! Your kudos and comments keep me truckin'.


	5. sublimation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A double update? It's a Christmas miracle! 
> 
> Thank you to everyone for reading; I hope you enjoy these two chapters. Please see the end of the chapter for additional warnings.

"You're in the paper," Bucky said to Steve the next morning, holding open the arts section as Steve came out of the shower. Steve made a face, toweling his hair off and then coming to sit next to Bucky.

"Do I want to know?" he asked.

Bucky shrugged; he hadn't even read it himself. "You want me to read it to you?"

"I don't know," said Steve, and then, "Yeah, I guess." He looked genuinely conflicted.

"You can tell me to stop if you want me to," Bucky said, a little amused, and then, clearing his throat. "Okay, here goes: There is nothing groundbreaking to be found at the aptly-titled 'Steve Rogers: Paintings;' in fact, some critics may argue - and probably already have - that the most interesting thing about Mr. Rogers' work is the glimpse it gives into a less-known facet of the man we are all familiar with as Captain America."

Steve made a face, about to interrupt, and Bucky said, "Wait, wait," and continued, "However, to relegate Mr. Rogers to the category of a celebrity hobbyist would be to ignore the very cogent display of talent shown in his paintings. With a keen eye for color and composition and a clear mastery of his medium, Mr. Rogers manages to imbue subject matter as ubiquitous as Brooklyn street scenes with a strange kind of nostalgia and, perhaps, melancholic longing. But the real stars of the show are his portraits. Again, many of these characters are public figures, but Rogers shows them in moments of vulnerability. Often, they confront the viewer with their gaze even as they appear lost in the frame, or perhaps merely interrupted. Rogers portrays them in warm, luminous colors, as if perhaps they are inviting the viewer to become lost with them."

Steve's brow had furrowed, but he didn't say anything, and after a moment, Bucky said, "It's not a bad review, you know."

"Yeah," Steve said. "Yeah, it's -- actually a pretty good review. I guess it's just strange to hear what someone else thought I was trying to say." He shook his head and smiled a little. "Melancholic longing."

"Melancholic longing is the first thing I say when I describe you to people, so I don't know what you're talking about," Bucky said, closing the newspaper and leaning over to give Steve a kiss on the mouth.

Steve smelled like the shower he'd just taken and tasted like toothpaste, and Bucky leaned into the kiss, closing his eyes and absorbing the simple joy of it, the sort of quiet morning he had never really imagined being able to have. Strange to have nothing to do, no pressing demands. He didn't know if he'd ever get used to it.

"Sirs?" said JARVIS suddenly. "Mr. Wilson is here."

Bucky and Steve pulled away from each other, but Sam was already walking in; JARVIS must have let him in before he even notified them. "Sorry," he said, "JARVIS just let me in, I thought --" he held up a box. "I brought donuts. I'm headed back down to D.C., so I thought I'd stop by and say bye before I left."

"Hey, Sam," said Steve, sitting back, as Bucky reached out for the box of donuts when Sam set it down on the table. "Sorry we're not more, uh, prepared for company."

"No problem," Sam said, taking a seat across from them. He had a thoughtful expression on his face. "You know, I've never seen you two like that before. And it's kind of hard to, uh, picture it in the imagination. But you two --" he paused, and the thoughtful expression melted into his familiar, broad smile. "You two make a really nice couple. You really do."

Steve blinked, surprised for a moment, and then looked immeasurably pleased. Bucky felt pleased too, although it was pretty easy to say that out of any of their friends, Sam would be the one he expected maybe _least_ to be anything other than gracious about it. About anything, really. "You want to sit down and have some coffee?" Steve asked.

"Ah, I gotta get going," Sam said. "I have a shitload of paperwork to catch up on before I go in tomorrow. And anyway I'll be back up in a couple of days for Tony's party. I'm hoping to get my mom up here to see your show at some point, maybe my sister, too."

"Your mom, huh?" Bucky asked, raising his eyebrows.

"She's a nurse," Sam said, "So if you're thinking she's gonna be scandalized over some naked man ass, boy have I got news for you." He grinned. "Enjoy the donuts, though. I'll see you guys again soon."

Steve got up to give him a hug, and Sam clapped Bucky on the shoulder and gave a wave as he walked back out. After he left, Steve reached for the box of donuts and opened them up, taking one out but not biting into it. "JARVIS," Steve said eventually, "A little more warning would be nice next time."

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. "My apologies."

Bucky wondered: Had JARVIS been trying to deliberately surprise them? Was he -- pushing their boundaries, or whatever? Or maybe it was just that he hadn't wanted to interrupt Bucky reading the article. Or maybe it wasn't either of those things; Bucky could never tell, was well aware that he was ascribing very human intentions to someone who wasn't actually human at all. It didn't matter. It was just another one of those mysteries he was never going to solve.

He grabbed a donut of his own and smiled at Steve, taking a bite. It made him remember one of those rare moments of kindness -- or maybe it hadn't been kindness at all, really, but anyway, what he remembered was someone breaking off a square of a chocolate bar, after a mission, and handing it to him. He had held it in his right hand for a minute, until it started to melt a little, and then whoever had given it to him had said, "Eat it, you can eat it," and when he had put it into his mouth, the sweetness had been so unexpected that it had almost brought tears to his eyes, had almost been painful. He hadn't known it then, but what he realized now was how much he'd forgotten about those simple things, how good food could taste - those pleasures which weren't big at all, but could move the earth in its orbit when you'd been denied them for a long time.

+++

The evening of Tony's party rolled around, a few days after the gallery opening. Steve had been in a good humor ever since that night, the sort of sustained cheerfulness which had been exceptionally rare when they were growing up, and Bucky couldn't help but think of it as precious for its rarity. He had never seen Steve this _happy_ before, and it made him, strangely, simultaneously happy himself and also a little afraid of what might happen to ruin it.

"Miss Potts is here to see you, sir," said JARVIS to him while he was shaving, and Bucky set aside his razor, giving his half-shaved face a rueful glance in the mirror and going to answer the door.

Pepper was standing outside, holding a small box, still clearly dressed in her office clothes for the day. "Hi," she said, smiling, and then giving a laugh when she noticed Bucky's unfinished beard removal. "Goodness, I've interrupted a very important task," she said, covering her grin with one hand even as Bucky beckoned her in. "I just wanted to bring this by for you before the party tonight."

She held out the box, and Bucky took it, surprised. He unwrapped it and opened it up to find a pair of very beautiful and very tasteful cufflinks nestled inside. "Cufflinks, I know, what a cliche," Pepper said.

"No, no," Bucky said, feeling taken aback, but in the best way possible. "Thank you, I -- I didn't get you anything, I'm sorry."

Pepper shook her head. "I _really_ don't need anything," she said. "I just -- wanted to get you something. To tell you that I appreciate you being my friend."

"Jesus," Bucky said, and reeled her in for a hug. He was almost shaken up by it, a little. Sometimes he still wasn't used to unexpected kindnesses, and they could set him far off-balance if he wasn't careful. "Pepper, thank _you_ ," he said. "I mean it. I don't -- I don't know if there's any way that I could possibly pay you back for everything you've done."

"Well," Pepper said primly, smoothing her skirt when he released her, "I suppose the good news is that you'll never have to, then." She smiled, put her hand on the unshaven side of his face, and leaned up to kiss the other, shaven, cheek. "I have to go get ready, but I'll see you later tonight."

"Thank you," Bucky said, still feeling stunned, as she turned and went back to the elevator.

Steve was still in the bedroom, far more dressed than Bucky was and fussing with his bow tie, and he leaned into the hallway as Bucky walked back toward the bathroom. "Who was that?" he asked.

"Pepper," Bucky said, holding the little box in both hands.

"What'd she want?" Steve asked, his eyebrows crinkling.

"To give me cufflinks," Bucky said. He handed the box to Steve, who opened it and said, "Buck, wow, these are really beautiful," and Bucky said "I know," and went back into the bathroom to finish shaving.

+++

They were a little late getting to the party - "Fashionably late," said Steve, who had been perpetually tardy for as long as Bucky had known him, but absolutely never fashionably so. There was a whole red carpet and there were photographers and everything. Steve put his arm around Bucky's waist while they waved and smiled, and Bucky absently watched the way that the cufflinks glinted in the flash of the cameras.

By the time they made it inside, Steve had already given soundbites to several reporters, one of whom was very interested in his sex life and only relented when Bucky had turned the full force of his Winter Soldier stare on her. He spotted Tony immediately, wearing a Santa hat and a tuxedo and holding a martini glass. "Hey!" said Tony. "There you are, the reporters didn't eat you alive, that's a relief, I needed at least one gay couple here, you know, diversity."

Steve's face wrinkled up like he'd smelled something bad, and Tony handed him a Santa hat. "Here you go," he said. "Barnes, I'll get one for you too, there's a whole table of stuff over there," and Bucky slipped away from Steve to gamely retrieve a headband with a pair of reindeer antlers on it. "Oh, that's good," Tony said, once Bucky had adjusted the hat on Steve's head to sit at a jaunty angle. "That's really good, Santa and Santa's Little Murderous Helper. Welcome to the party."

"Thanks, Tony," Steve said dryly, but his expression cleared a little when Bucky winked at him. This party was slightly less formal than Tony's other parties Bucky had been to - everyone was still all dressed up, but the music was _some_ kind of weird upbeat Christmas music, rather than orchestral, and there was a DJ booth set up at the back.

"Bar's over there," said Tony, "I don't know, have fun, enjoy yourselves. I have to mingle, mingling is my official duty. Pepper's here somewhere. I haven't seen anyone else yet."

He disappeared into the crowd while still somehow remaining highly visible - Tony's party skills were something that Bucky genuinely envied, and figured must have come from a storied history of upscale parties that Bucky and Steve could never have hoped to compete with in a million years. "The hat looks nice," Bucky said to Steve.

"Thanks," Steve said. "Santa's Little Murderous Helper."

"That's me," Bucky said, "Although the 'little' is debatable in a number of ways. Come on, let's get a drink so we don't look like we're just standing around."

They went over to the bar and Bucky ordered himself and Steve both whiskeys, and Steve made a face when he took a drink of his. "I haven't had whiskey in a long time," he said. "It still burns when it goes down."

"It burns," Bucky agreed, "but then it doesn't do anything else." He spotted Natasha and Sam coming in and gave them both a wave. Natasha was wearing burgundy, the expanse of her white neck and chest very appealingly on display, and Sam looked great in his tuxedo, if slightly jittery.

"Holy shit, he already got you with the Santa hat," said Sam, glancing over a the table of party favors. "Am I supposed to wear one too? I feel like probably."

"Probably," Steve said, and Natasha went over and grabbed a silver snowflake tiara for herself and, after a moment of deliberation, an elf hat for Sam.

"Nice," Sam said, putting it on and adjusting it so that the ears hung down over his own. "How do I look?"

"Amazing," said Bucky, totally sincerely, and then everyone cracked up, even Natasha. "Hey," he said to her. "I thought you were going to be on a mission."

"I was," Natasha said. "It -- ended early." She gave Bucky a wry smile, and he could read in between her words what she was really saying, made a mental note to ask her more about it later. If she was allowed to tell him, which she wasn't always. "So I'm not missing the party after all."

"At the rate we're going you're going to wish you did by the end of it," Bucky said, and then, tapping Sam on the shoulder and pointing at Tony where he was surrounded by a crowd of women in sequined dresses, "You should probably go let Tony know you're here, I think he's having trouble meeting his diversity quota. He told Steve and me that he needed us here to check the 'gay couple' slot."

"Shit," said Sam, "I'm important, huh. Nah, there's another black guy over there, I can't be that important. And I mean, Natasha isn't either, there's already another redhead here too."

"I might be the only Russian here," Natasha said, and Bucky glanced at her. "No, Barnes, you don't count, even if you do speak the language. You're from Brooklyn."

"I wonder if Thor's coming," Steve said, and Bucky said, "Why, so you can admire his biceps and ask him for haircare tips on how to keep your golden tresses shining?" and Steve started to reply with, "Yeah, and maybe he can teach you how to braid --" and then Natasha said, "Oh my god, I need a drink," and went to the bar with Sam.

"This music is really something else," Bucky said, glancing out at the few people who were awkwardly trying to dance. True to his word, he'd taught Steve how to dance -- just a simple waltz ("I know you know how to count to three, Steven,") but he'd kind of been hoping to get to try it out tonight, which might not happen if they got stuck with Mariah Carey simpering about Christmas all night long.

"It's something else, all right," Steve agreed, which was saying something. He took another drink of his whiskey and made a face again. "I really never understood why you liked this."

"Yeah, and I never understood your poor taste in liquor, so we're about even there," Bucky said, knocking the rest of his whiskey back and taking Steve's from him and finishing it too. "I'll get you something else, hang on."

He went to the bar and ordered Steve a gin and tonic and adjusted his antlers, feeling nothing at all from the alcohol. It was -- he felt strange. He felt strange, because -- there was -- the last time he'd been at a Christmas party, there was --

The bartender slid the glass across the bar to him, and he said thanks and stuck a bill in the tip jar. When he carried it over to Steve, Steve said, "You didn't get another one for yourself?"

"No point," Bucky answered, watching Pepper come over to Tony, Tony turn to gesture at them, and then Pepper's smile as she waved at him and Steve. "Where'd Sam and Natasha go?"

"Natasha went to talk to someone she knew, and Sam's with Colonel Rhodes," Steve said. That was right, James Rhodes, Tony's friend. Bucky had heard of him, met him briefly, but didn't really know him. He thought with some amusement that Natasha and Sam had ditched them fast.

"I was hoping we'd get to dance," Bucky said to Steve, offhand, and then reached out for Pepper's fingers as she made her way through the crowd, turning her so he could admire the way the dress flowed around her.

"James helped me pick this out," Pepper said, and she looked lovely; the dress glinted like starlight in the dimness of the room. She shifted her glass to her other hand and gave Steve a hug, and then Bucky. She smelled like jasmine and vanilla.

"It looks great," Steve said, "and the cufflinks you got him are beautiful." He smiled at her. "You have good taste."

"Thank you," Pepper replied graciously, although of course she had to know that. "I see Tony already got to you with the um, festive wearables."

"Yeah, I notice you don't have one," Bucky said, "Are you exempt from it for some reason?"

"I'm exempt because I'm the CEO," Pepper replied, very seriously. "And I make the rules."

"Right," Bucky said. "Well, festive wearables or no, I want to dance with you sometime tonight if this DJ ever plays something worth dancing to, okay?"

"I'd better keep drinking, then," Pepper said, and then glanced over at the DJ booth and made a face. "I'll go talk to him, but I think he has some kind of pre-approved playlist that I --" she lifted her glass in a salute and then drained the rest of her martini -- " _clearly_ did not pay enough attention to."

She stepped back again and smiled at both of them, looking them up and down. "You both look wonderful," she said, touching Steve's cheek, which left him looking a little surprised. "I'm glad you're here." She glanced over her shoulder and said, "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go extract Tony, he's in over his head," and whisked away again across the floor.

"You keep this up and you're going to have a full dance card," Steve said. "You'll end up dancing to Mariah Carey whether you want to or not."

"There are worse fates," Bucky replied. "How's your gin and tonic?'

"Better than the whiskey," Steve said, eyes roving. "Let's go talk to Dr. Banner."

"Sure," said Bucky, and followed Steve over. He was -- sweating a little, it was strange, because he wasn't hot, and the whiskey sure as hell hadn't done it to him; that would have been a welcome respite. The last time he'd -- the last time, it had been -- he had a vivid sense memory of the world swaying around him, the walls fluctuating in and out as if they were breathing.

"Sit him down," someone said, "Jesus Christ, what did they give him? He's really fucked up."

His head lolled to the side, ended up on someone's shoulder. "Look, Rumlow, he likes you," said someone, laughing, and the man whose shoulder his head was on shifted him so he was sitting upright again --

"Alcohol is a depressant," Dr. Banner was saying, "So it's actually all right, in moderation, as long as I don't have enough that my impulse control is compromised." He was wearing a headband with a menorah on it. "So, cheers!"

"Cheers," said Steve, clinking his glass with Dr. Banner's, and Bucky laughed and held up his empty hand because he didn't have a glass to clink. A champagne toast -- no, Steve wasn't drinking champagne at all, Steve was drinking gin, and Dr. Banner had a beer --

"A new year to bring us closer to peace and prosperity," Secretary Pierce said, holding his glass aloft. "A new year, a new order."

"Look at him listen to Pierce," said somebody, and Rumlow hissed, "Shut up, of course he's listening, and you should be too."

Bucky took a breath and said to Steve, "I'll be right back, okay?"

Steve looked at him with a little concern and then nodded, and Bucky went to the bathroom for a second to get away from the noise and the crowd. It only took a minute, and a small splash of cold water on his face, and then he was all right again. Even looking in the mirror helped, looking at his cleanshaven face and neat hair, the silly reindeer headband.

When he went back out again, he didn't spot Steve immediately, so he went and loitered near the DJ booth. The DJ -- a harried-looking guy who seemed to be in his early 20's -- spotted Bucky looking and beckoned him over, so Bucky went, curious.

"Listen, dude," said the DJ, "I really need a cigarette break, can you watch this for a second for me? I'm not supposed to leave it unattended."

Bucky blinked. "Sure," he said. "Just show me what to do first."

"You don't have to do anything," the DJ said. "It's literally just a pre-set playlist, it's kind of lame. Just let it play."

"All right," Bucky said dubiously, and the DJ clapped him on the shoulder.

"I owe you one, man," he said, and skittered out of there like his ass was on fire. Bucky looked down at the computer's playlist and made a face, pulling his phone out of the inside pocket of his jacket. No wonder, he thought, finding a USB cable and plugging his phone into the computer.

He waited for an opportune moment, when one song was ending, and then switched away from the playlist entirely. A few people glanced up at the DJ booth at the change in tone, but then people actually started dancing, and Bucky felt a little smug, sitting down in the folding chair that the DJ had pulled up and making a new playlist from his own library and the DJ's expansive collection, which had previously been going to waste.

The DJ came back again after a few minutes and Bucky saw his face drain of all color. "What the fuck, man," he said, standing and staring out at everyone dancing - which, Bucky saw, included an enthusiastic Sam and a laughing Natasha. "I'm going to get fired."

"Don't worry," Bucky said, unplugging his phone - he'd copied everything he needed onto the DJ's computer anyway - and clapping the DJ on the shoulder with enough force that the DJ swayed a little. "I know Captain America. It's fine. Just tell them Bucky made you do it."

The DJ mouthed 'Bucky,' the gears in his brain clearly working very hard, and Bucky held up his metal hand, waved, and ghosted out of the area while the DJ was still staring with a freaked-out expression at the crowd.

He found Steve standing and looking deeply amused and at the same time deeply chagrined, holding what appeared to be a fresh gin and tonic. "I got a little worried when you didn't come back from the bathroom right away," he said, "but then I saw you were performing a service to the American public, so I wasn't too worried."

"Some folks might call it heroism," said Bucky. "Some might call it terrorism. Personally, I call it 'finish your drink and get your ass on the dance floor with me.'"

"Oh no," Steve said, "This isn't a waltz, and _everyone_ here knows me," and Bucky said, "Fuck off, you're wearing a _Santa hat,_ " and Steve set his drink aside and they went onto the floor together.

Maybe it was the drinks, although Bucky couldn't understand how that could be, but Steve seemed a little more fluid this time, more relaxed, and he even kissed Bucky right there in the middle of the dance floor, his mouth tasting like the tang of lime and the metallic flavor of gin.

After a few minutes they had both unbuttoned their jackets and Bucky was tempted to take his off entirely, though if he did that it'd mean leaving the dance floor to find somewhere to put it, and that seemed like just about the worst idea in the world right now, with both of Steve's hands on his hips, one of them straying lower than was strictly proper. He caught sight of Natasha's red hair bouncing in his periphery, and turned away to pull her in too, surprised when she came to him amiably.

Steve took the cue and let go in time to awkwardly grab onto Sam instead, and they stared at each other for a second and then started laughing, and Bucky took pity on them both and gave Natasha to Steve instead, winking at Sam. Sam was a good dancer, and Steve seemed to be doing just fine with Natasha, so it all worked out perfectly.

"I feel like I'm invading Steve's turf," Sam called, and Bucky just shrugged and shook his head, grinning at Steve when Steve looked over.

"You haven't even seen me naked yet, so we got a long way to go on that one," he said to Sam, who made a face.

"Whoa, man, way more than I needed to know," he said, and Bucky winked at him again and he laughed and whirled away from Bucky, almost running into an older woman, but recovering gracefully and taking her hand instead.

Bucky felt a hand on his own shoulder and turned around to find Pepper there, laughing and flushed. "I had like four martinis," she said. "If I can't have four martinis at my own Christmas -- holiday! -- party, then when can I?" and Bucky picked up the train of her dress where it was about to get stepped on.

"I think that's perfectly acceptable behavior," he said, and let her lean on him as the song slowed a little, his hand on her lower back. "Although, I mean, I hang around with Steve, my idea of what's acceptable behavior might be awful skewed."

Pepper laughed, her cheek resting against his shoulder. "I hang around with Tony Stark," she said, "so I completely, totally have you beat on that," she said, and he had to concede she was probably right.

"None of this music is even a little bit Christmas related!" Tony shouted, appearing from the crowd holding his martini glass over his head. "Barnes, you're ruining the holiday spirit!" and then _he_ kissed Bucky on the cheek, which, okay -- Bucky could admit this was getting weird now, but not -- as weird -- as --

"He can barely stand up," said Rumlow, kneeling in front of him where he sat slumped against the wall, grabbing his chin. His eyelids were so heavy, his mouth hanging open a little. Rumlow was wearing a suit, a grey tie. "How's he gonna be good for anything if he can't even keep his eyes open?"

He licked his lips; he was thirsty, so thirsty. "This was a terrible fucking idea," Rumlow was saying to the other man. "I know Pierce wanted to show him off, but he's not real impressive when he's drugged into fucking oblivion."

"It'll have to be good enough," the other man said, kneeling down too and peering at the soldier. "They must have thought if he was less -- uh, sedated -- he wouldn't be safe to be around."

"He's never safe to be around," Rumlow spat, and then slapped the soldier on the cheek. "Come on, snap out of it--"

He was dancing with Steve again, and Steve was grinning, looking a little shiny with sweat. "See?" he asked Steve. "It's not so bad, huh?"

"No," said Steve, "I guess not. Not when it's with you."

"You melt my cold heart," said Bucky, and kissed him, and Sam and Natasha and Tony and Pepper all cheered and hooted around them.

+++

He didn't remember much of the rest of -- _that_ night. The other party. This one, he could remember just fine, but it was interrupted by _not-_ remembering what had happened to him before. It was probably -- he was thankful, really, he thought, leaning against Steve and breathing through his mouth, staring out the window of the car as it took them back to the tower. It was probably for the best, he probably didn't want to know --

Steve's hand on his thigh crept higher, his fingers stroking Bucky's inseam. When they got home, he dragged Bucky by the hand into the elevator, lifted him up as if Bucky weighed nothing -- which, now more than ever, was not true -- and pinned him to the wall, kissing him fiercely. Bucky wrapped his legs around Steve and put both of his hands into Steve's hair, gasping for it. They stayed in the elevator for a minute even when it made it to their floor, Steve holding Bucky there, with his mouth on Bucky's neck, Bucky staring up at the ceiling and groaning as Steve's teeth scraped against his skin.

Steve let him down eventually and Bucky stumbled after Steve, who grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and yanked him into the bedroom, then picked him up and bodily threw him down onto the bed; Bucky couldn't do anything but stare up at him, astonished, while Steve wrestled him out of his jacket, shirt, and pants. Eventually he tried to help, but Steve just pinned his wrists to the bed above his head, undoing his own bow tie. He was careful to set the cufflinks aside, on the bedside table, but Bucky had the feeling that action was using up the last of Steve's carefulness for the evening.

He lay there in his underwear while Steve got undressed too, twisting his wrists a little in Steve's grasp - he could probably break the hold if he tried. But testing his strength against Steve's even slightly got a look from Steve that would almost certainly have set a lesser man on fire, and the tightening of Steve's fingers, tight enough that Bucky thought he could feel the bones of his right wrist grinding together.

It hurt a little, but -- but -- it was -- a good hurt. Steve let go of Bucky's wrists when he finished undressing and slid down the bed until he was half on the floor, yanking Bucky's underwear off and sucking Bucky's cock into his mouth in one fell swoop. Bucky almost shouted in surprise, his whole body arching up off the bed, and he put one hand on Steve's head, his thumb stroking the curve of Steve's ear, the corner of his jaw, until Steve pulled it away and pinned it to the bed again.

Bucky felt like he was about to come in virtually no time flat, and he squirmed against the bed until Steve's other hand came up and pinned his hips down, Steve's eyes flashing up to glance at him. "Steve," Bucky complained, "Steve, Steve," and Steve sucked harder, and Bucky did come, his hips and his wrist jerking against Steve's hold.

Steve swallowed and pulled away, licking his lips, red-faced himself. He took a moment to look at Bucky, who could do nothing but lay there and pant, sure he looked crazy as hell, wild-eyed, his hair a mess from tossing his head around against the bedsheets. He reached his free hand up to push it back out of his face and found that he was trembling slightly, and --

Steve didn't give him very long to think about it; he grabbed Bucky by the hips and flipped him over, yanking Bucky's lower half up until Bucky was on his knees, and then pushing his shoulders down against the bed. Bucky gave a moan, muffled by the pillow he'd shoved his face into, propping himself up onto his elbows a little, grabbing for the headboard. Steve was knocking his knees apart further, and Bucky's toes were curling against the sheets as Steve wasted no time in putting two slippery fingers inside of him.

"Please," Bucky managed, turning his head slightly, opening his eyes to stare blearily back at Steve. He was too far gone to read the expression on Steve's face at all, or to wonder what it meant, but it didn't matter, because Steve got the hint and withdrew his fingers after slicking Bucky up almost perfunctorily. Bucky swore as Steve pushed inside, but only nominally because it hurt a little, more because he liked the edge of the hurt, could even have said he craved it right now.

Steve's hand grabbed his hair, and Steve pulled, turning Bucky's face toward him more fully. Bucky's mouth was open, leaving a damp spot against the pillow, and he fought to keep his eyes open too, watching Steve as Steve fucked him, the expression of focused concentration on Steve's face that eventually gave way somewhat to a softer expression of pleasure.

Bucky came after a particularly hard thrust, almost surprised by it, the pinpricks of a tear at the corner of his eye from the steady pull of Steve's hand in his hair, and for a moment he thought he might pass out. He couldn't catch his breath, gasping, his eyes rolling back in his head. Steve's movements slowed, and it was only when Bucky's breath got steadier that they picked up again, and then Steve was grabbing Bucky around the chest and hauling him back, hauling them both back until Bucky was resting on Steve's thighs with Steve's face buried between his neck and his shoulder and Steve's arm around his chest.

He tipped his head back, exposing his throat, feeling Steve's breath puffing out hot against his skin, right above the place where his pulse hammered. His hair spilled back over Steve's shoulder, and it made Steve shiver, maybe ticklishly; his arm tightened around Bucky's chest, and Bucky felt him shudder more forcefully and then come, a hot spurt inside.

Steve held him there for a few moments, and then his grip relaxed, and Bucky half-fell forward, collapsing onto the bed. "What the fuck got into you," he managed to say eventually, hoarsely, as Steve sat panting, glistening with sweat in the dim light that had come on at some point without either of them turning any lamps on.

"I don't know," Steve said, shaking his head. Even now he still looked a little wild-eyed, that same sort of exhilarated expression Bucky had used to think of as meaning, without a doubt, trouble. He glanced over at Bucky, running a hand through his hair. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"A little," Bucky said, and then, before Steve's expression could shift into alarm, "I liked it."

Steve didn't say anything, crawling up beside Bucky and lying down, pulling Bucky into his arms and stroking his fingers through Bucky's tangled hair. "I feel like I got hit by a truck, though," Bucky said, and then he laughed, because he actually knew what being hit by a truck felt like, and this was -- a lot better than that.

+++

Bucky woke up the next morning feeling pleasantly _sore_ , and sticky as hell. He groaned, extricating himself from Steve and the tangle of the sheets around them and half-limping into the hall, getting a fresh set of sheets from the linen closet and then going to turn the coffeemaker on and start a pot brewing.

Steve was awake by the time he came back, blinking and rubbing his eyes, squinting against the morning light. He sat up, licking his lips, and looked at Bucky with a sort of familiar half-asleep confusion. "Help me get the sheets off," Bucky said, nudging his shoulder. "I need to put those in the wash, they're all sticky."

Steve glanced down, seeming to realize the truth of Bucky's statement, and made a face, rolling slowly out of bed and stiffly pulling his corner of the bedding off.

Between the two of them, they managed, although Steve spent more time looking at Bucky than at the task at hand, and was half-hard by the time Bucky turned to take the sheets to the laundry room. "Jesus," Bucky said from the doorway, watching Steve look at him slightly forlornly, "you're insatiable, Rogers, just put the sheets on the bed."

He put the dirty sheets in the wash and went to pour two cups of coffee. Steve had not made a lot of progress on the sheets by the time he got back, and Bucky sighed, setting the coffee down and doing it himself, albeit not with exactly the precision that Steve usually did. "Get back in bed," he said to Steve, who obeyed, and then Bucky handed him a mug of coffee. "Drink that and I'm going to go turn the shower on."

He rinsed off quickly himself before going back into the bedroom, and by the time he got there Steve was looking considerably more awake and typing on his phone. He glanced up when Bucky came back in. "You up for going to visit Peggy today?" he asked.

Bucky shrugged, picking up his mug of coffee and sipping it, watching his hair drip on the floor for a second. "Why not," he said, and Steve smiled a little before setting his phone aside and getting out of bed.

He shivered, goosebumping. "It's kind of cold in here," he said, passing by Bucky. It wasn't really very cold at all, only cold compared to the warmth of the bed, especially with a hot cup of coffee in your hands.

"Why are you telling me?" Bucky asked, taking Steve's empty mug and starting to head back toward the kitchen. "You know you can just ask JARVIS to turn the heat up."

Steve made a noncommittal noise in response and then Bucky heard the sound of the shower door sliding closed.

+++

After Steve got out of the shower, Bucky made some breakfast. Steve ravenously ate about three-quarters of it and then apologized when he realized he'd done so, leaving only a smaller portion for Bucky. “It’s fine,” Bucky said, shaking his head in amusement, and then they got dressed and ready to go down and visit Peggy.

Bucky had seen her a couple of times before, but the second time she hadn't really remembered him being back again; it seemed to be a crapshoot what she did or didn't remember, which he understood all too well, except that it was infinitely more painful in this case because nothing but the cruel ravages of time were to blame, and because the Agent Carter he remembered was almost defined in his mind by her tack-sharpness.

There was a woman in probably her sixties sitting outside in the waiting room when they got there. She was looking at her phone, and half-glanced at them when they came in before turning back to what she was doing. When the nurse came out to get Steve and Bucky, she looked up again, surprised, and in that moment Bucky saw her face and couldn't not realize that she was Peggy's daughter. "Excuse me," she said to Steve and Bucky, "You're here to see Mrs. Carter? My mother?"

Steve turned around from where he'd been talking to the nurse, and Peggy's daughter got a good look at him and said, "Oh, Steve -- Captain Rogers, I'm -- I'm sorry, we've never really met before, I didn't recognize you." She smoothed her hair -- still dark, but who knew if it was helped along by dye -- back, and reached out to shake Steve's hand. "I'm Jean Delacroix. I'm her daughter."

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Steve said, shaking her hand. Bucky could see the faint signs of pain on his face clearly, even if he tried to mask it and did a pretty good job of it. "I hope we're not interrupting anything, any family matters. I just wanted to wish her a Merry Christmas." He glanced at Bucky. "This is James Barnes."

Jean looked at Bucky searchingly and then said, "Oh, of course," and shook Bucky's hand, too, before turning back to Steve. "You're not interrupting anything," she said. "In fact, I -- think you count as family too. I think she'd count you as family. Please go ahead in. I'm just waiting on my brother. Take as long as you like, she'll be happy to see you."

Steve nodded and let the nurse lead them inside, where Peggy immediately turned from where she'd been gazing out the window to smile at them, brilliantly, her steel-grey hair all spread out across the pillow and framing her face. "Susanne told me you were coming," she said to Steve, maybe Bucky. "I'm so glad to see you, Steve, James. Happy Christmas."

"Heya, Peggy," said Steve, going over and taking her hand, bending down to kiss her cheek with a sort of exquisite sweetness, and Bucky went over too, and did the same, from the other side. "Merry Christmas."

"I can't believe another year's come and gone," said Peggy, still smiling, as they both sat down at her bedside. Steve laced his fingers with Bucky's and rested them together on his knee, and Peggy's eyes followed the movement with a keenness that was like seeing her in 1943, her immaculate hair and her perfect red lipstick, overlayed over her older self now. "Another year gone and all I've done is lie in bed, while the two of you have been out saving the world, as usual. I do miss being young."

She lifted her hand and reached out to stroke Steve's hair back, and then her finger, her skin soft and crepey, landed on Bucky's cheek too, affectionately, surprising him. "I don't know if I've been doing a lot of world-saving," Bucky said. "I tend to leave that to Steve. He's a lot better at it."

"I hope, at the very least, you're there to keep him from doing absolutely foolish things liable to get him killed without a second thought," Peggy said, and Bucky laughed, ducking his head.

"The day I learn to keep him from doing things like that will be a momentous occasion, ma'am," he said, "but I do try."

Steve was smiling slightly. "No," Peggy sighed, "I think that's the best one can do, really. There's no use in trying to change him. I figured that out very quickly."

"You're a quicker study than me, then," Bucky said.

"Oh, that reminds me: I saw you in the papers," said Peggy, reaching for a copy of the article about Steve's art exhibition that was sitting near her bed. "How excited you must have been; I remember you always had a pencil in your hand when you had a moment to yourself."

"It was -- amazing," Steve said, smiling. "And I have Bucky to thank for that too, really, because he put it all together, along with Miss Potts. I can show you some more pictures, if you want."

He got out his phone and showed some photos of the paintings to Peggy, and it was then that Bucky could see that she _had_ changed, that old age had made her vulnerable, because he had never seen her so unguardedly happy -- delighted, even -- back during the war. She had always been carefully tempered, never showing too much. But now there was no longer anyone to judge her, and she had already made all the mistakes she was going to, so she was, in a way, free.

"How about you, Peggy?" Steve said, after he had put his phone away. "How have you been?"

"Oh, as well as can be expected," Peggy said. "My memory comes and goes, and no matter how the nurses try to keep it from me, I can always tell. I spend so much time sleeping now! And I get tired so easily, but I haven't really got any complaints." She paused for a moment, her brow furrowing. "Well, I suppose I do have one. This time of the year I do miss the Christmas music. I imagine I could ask one of the nurses to turn on the television, but it's not the same. I miss listening to -- there used to be carolers, or, even during the war, sometimes the men would sing."

"There were always the USO shows, too," Steve agreed, musing, and then looking at Bucky. "Bucky's got a fine voice. He could sing you a carol."

Bucky should have felt irritated at being trotted out like a prize pony, but it was just Steve trying to do a kindness for Peggy, so he didn't really have it in him. "Yes, I do remember you told me once that he could sing," Peggy said. "It was before I met him -- I always wished I had gotten to know you better, you know, James. Both of you, I suppose, but especially you, because you were so important to Steve, it felt as if I was missing a whole piece of him -- yes, would you sing something?"

Bucky sat up a little and cleared his throat. It had been a _while_ , and he was liable to be rusty. He closed his eyes for a moment and drew up a memory, a moment where he'd been sitting with his back to a tree, shivering with his rifle by his side and a hot tin mug of something that hadn't really been coffee clutched in his hands. The faint sounds of a radio coming from the tent where Steve was going over the mission with Dernier and Jones; someone would be out soon to take the next watch.

He started to sing - "I'll Be Home For Christmas," that had been the song, and he could remember that particular version of it clearly even though he'd heard a lot of other versions since. That had been the first version, back in the war, Bing Crosby's sad soft voice calling out across the snow.

He opened his eyes again and Peggy was looking at him with rapt attention and a few tears in her eyes. Steve started to sing too, softly, on the second verse. He had never been one for singing, really; his voice had been lower than Bucky's ever since adolescence, a baritone to Bucky's tenor, and he always had to be coaxed into it, although he could carry a tune just fine. He had always had a natural ear for harmony, when Bucky could get him to sing at all, and Bucky had always thought that their voices sounded nice together - now, without the burr of Steve's asthma, with the benefit of all those years, looking back, maybe more than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Bucky sings, ["I'll Be Home For Christmas,"](http://youtu.be/dL71eMc1blw) was in fact written from the perspective of a WWII soldier writing a letter to his family.
> 
> During a party, Bucky flashes back to a party he was drugged and forced to attend while in Hydra's captivity.


	6. noel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second part of the 2-chapter update! Please heed the warnings at the end of the chapter.

The morning of Christmas dawned bright and sunny, with a fresh coat of powdery snow covering everything, making it all seem even lighter than it was. It was almost as if the entire world was expressing its good cheer, and while Bucky groaned when he rolled over and saw what time it was, he didn't have it in him to be irritated by his body's learned responses. Not right now.

Next to him, Steve hummed, a low pleased sound reminiscent of nothing so much as a cat's purr. His skin was so warm, always so warm, and Bucky rolled back toward him and tucked his head under Steve's arm, against Steve's chest. He closed his eyes again, well aware that sleep would probably elude him despite his best efforts, but not really caring. He listened to Steve's heart, the deep steady thump-thump-thump of it, the soft shh-shh of Steve's breaths, the best sort of poetry he could imagine.

Once upon a time they had done this before. It had been strange enough then, though they had pretended it wasn't; it was just for the sake of heat, just for the sake of Steve, whose teeth chattered and whose bones showed through his thin skin, who couldn't fall asleep when he was cold, and their goddamn apartment had always been cold in the winter. There had been a certain stubborn resistance, mostly on Steve's part, and when Steve's shifting and wheezing had woken him one too many times, Bucky would always roll over and say, "Love of god, Steve, just come here," and Steve would reluctantly crawl under Bucky's arm, tucking his body up against Bucky's, his cold hands stuffed under his own armpits.

Bucky had known for a very long time that he loved Steve more than you ought to love your best friend, maybe more than any one person was meant to love another. But there was nothing for it, or so he had thought, and so he had said nothing, done nothing, and they had both passed it off or pretended that it wasn't there: The way that Bucky always ended up with Steve in his arms and his face against Steve's sternum, or with Steve's head tucked under his chin, the way that he inhaled the smell Steve's hair for a minute before letting go in the morning. The way that Steve sighed when Bucky woke, his hands stroking along the curve of Bucky's back, the way their legs always tangled together no matter how hard they tried to keep themselves separate.

It had been easy to pretend, or maybe Bucky only remembered it as easy. Maybe it was fear that made it easy; now he knew he couldn't possibly go back to pretending. Now that he'd found Steve a second time, this second version of Steve, second or third or fourth version of himself (he didn't know how to count, really; there was no rulebook for that), the value of pretension had been lost entirely.

"Your heart's going fast," Steve said quietly, his voice rough and full of sleep. Bucky opened his eyes again and glanced up at Steve. "You have a dream?"

"No," Bucky said, honestly. "I was just thinking about you."

+++

There was a whole roster of events planned out for them, mostly private ones, thank god, and a small photo op. Bucky made an entire pan of enormous, sticky cinnamon rolls and watched as Steve put far too much frosting on and then ate about half the pan himself. They were meant to share, but --

"I'm sorry," Steve said, licking icing from his thumb, still in his underwear, his hair tousled and his face pink. He'd been awake for at least an hour or two but had yet to shake it off, and seemed just fine with being perpetually lazy this morning. "These are so good, Buck. They're too good. You can't give them to anyone else, you'll just -- they'll be addicted."

"Yeah, that could get out of hand really fast," Bucky said, wiping his floury hands on the front of his apron, and then reaching for the ingredients again, to make another batch. Steve's eyes widened, and he groaned when he realized what Bucky was doing.

"What?" Bucky asked him.

"I'll have to eat them all," Steve said, reaching for _another_ cinnamon roll, "I have to save them, Bucky."

Bucky rolled his eyes and rapped Steve's knuckles lightly with the spatula. There had been days -- weeks, months -- where Steve had been too sick to keep much down; he'd eat something and then just cough and cough until it came back up, all the tendons in his neck standing out with the force of his coughs, his eyes watering with it. Steve had mostly been over that by the time he lived with Bucky, but there was a particular memory where Bucky, maybe ten or eleven, was standing in the doorway of Steve's bedroom and Steve's Ma was trying to get him to drink some water, and rubbing his back in small circles. Bucky remembered copying that movement, that exact movement, some years later, and --

Later still, he realized, much more recently, he could remember Steve's hand on his own back, rubbing, in small circles.

Steve was frowning a little at him as he mixed up the bowl of dough, and Bucky surmised that his expression must be saying something he didn't intend to. "You okay?" Steve asked eventually, taking a spatula and spreading icing evenly across the remaining cinnamon rolls with an almost painterly touch.

"Yeah," Bucky said, covering the bowl of dough and setting it aside to rise. "Yeah, I was just thinking about -- when you would get sick, before the war, and you'd hardly be able to eat anything."

Steve's eyebrows raised slightly in surprise, and then settled again into an expression of thoughtful concern. "I remember that," he said. "It seems like -- I don't know. It's so close but so far away at the same time."

Bucky nodded. "I was lucky to have you back then," Steve said after another moment. "I'm lucky to have you now."

Ostensibly anyone who had known them in their younger years would have agreed that it was a fair assessment. Agreed that Bucky was trading down with Steve. And from what Bucky had read, anyone who wrote about Steve now always acknowledged this fact, but immediately condemned it as a fallacy, operating as they were from the enlightened perspective of Steve's subsequent heroics as Captain America. There was nobody left now besides Bucky -- and, of course Steve -- who remembered those desperate times as they really had been.

He had gone quiet again, and Steve was still looking at him. "Mostly," said Steve, dipping his thumb into the icing -- Bucky made a noise at him -- "I'm lucky to have these cinnamon rolls." He leaned across the counter and smeared the icing on Bucky's mouth, and then tilted his chin to kiss it off, and Bucky realized that he was a fool for dwelling on the bitterness of the past when the future had turned out sweet, in the end.

+++

Because Steve was Steve, they were late making it down to the common area, where there was a Christmas tree that Bucky could have sworn was at least forty feet tall and completely covered in an obscene amount of twinkle lights. Everyone else was already there, even Barton, whose arm was in a sling, who must just have gotten back from his mission in Laos.

The official word was that this was meant to be a potluck. Tony had immediately clarified that by "potluck," he didn't mean anyone had to cook anything, as he definitely wasn't planning on cooking anything himself, but that everybody had to bring something, and tortilla chips or Chinese takeout didn't count. Bucky had no doubts that most of the spread was probably provided by Tony - there was an enormous golden-brown turkey that made his mouth start watering at the sight of it, what could only be described as a _vat_ of mashed potatoes, and everything else a Christmas meal was supposed to include, in excess.

Bucky found a place for his pan-and-a-third of cinnamon rolls and set them down, wondering what, if anything else, the others had brought. They all had plates already, and judging from Barton's slightly glazed expression and his hand on his stomach, had been eating for a little while.

"Capsicle, Bionic Man!" Tony said from his position ensconced as the sole owner of a huge couch, his feet up on the armrest. "Glad you could finally make it, please don't tell us why you're late. We were waiting for you to get here to start presents."

Bucky gave Steve an apprehensive glance - neither he nor Steve had, as far as he knew, gotten anything for anyone. "Don't worry," Natasha said, standing up with her empty plate and going to get another helping of mashed potatoes. "It's a casual gift-giving thing, you didn't have to get anyone anything. In fact you're probably ahead of all of us in terms of thoughtfulness since you brought cinnamon rolls."

"Cinnamon rolls?" said Barton, sitting up and groaning. "I just brought alcohol."

"So did I," Natasha said. "And this is all catered. Bruce made a salad."

"Huh," said Bucky, grabbing a plate for himself and one for Steve. "So it was a potluck, but it wasn't really a potluck, is what you're saying."

"It was a potluck for people who don't cook," Natasha said. "I think Tony knew what he was getting himself into here when he sent the e-mail."

Pepper appeared from somewhere and adjusted Tony so that she could fit on the couch with him. She was dressed more casually than Bucky had ever seen her, and it was a good look on her; for once she actually seemed relaxed, running her fingers through Tony's hair and sipping at a glass of wine. "Well," Bucky said, "Then the cinnamon rolls are my gift to all of you, except for the nine that Steve already ate."

" _Nine?_ " said Bruce and Natasha at the same time, and Steve had the good graces to look flustered, although the fact that he had already loaded his plate up with an obscene amount of food diminished the gesture slightly.

"Haven't you heard?" Bucky asked, pouring himself and Steve each a glass of wine too, handing Steve's off to him and then sitting down on an unoccupied couch. "Steve's attempting to transform himself into a cinnamon roll. For the good of mankind."

"How's that going so far?" Barton asked.

"I don't know," Steve said, sitting down next to Bucky. "I haven't seen any changes yet, results are inconclusive. But the cinnamon rolls are delicious."

After Steve and Bucky had had a chance to tuck in, Tony got up and went over to the tree and started hunting through the wrapped gifts at the bottom, apparently attempting to find one to distribute to each of them. It made Bucky nervous again, because he -- hadn't received any gifts in a long time, and back when he and Steve had done Christmas it had been more about spending time with each other than it was about giving the gifts they couldn't have afforded. Tony meant well, Bucky knew, but in a way, the display of ostentatious excess just served to remind Bucky of how different things were now, of how little he'd had before, and of how he had _too much_ now, far too much.

Most of the gifts turned out to be silly stuff -- small, practical, or both. At one point Tony gave Pepper a bag that said _Victoria's Secret_ on the side; she opened it with a visible air of reprehension and distaste, but it turned out to be a stylish tablet case, at which Pepper's expression of relief sent Tony into gales of laughter. Natasha had gotten Steve socks, which must have been some kind of inside joke between them, because he held them up and chuckled, before leaning back and putting his arm around Bucky again.

Tony -- or Pepper -- or both -- had gotten or made Bucky some kind of Swiss army knife type device which contained a great deal more potentially lethal weapons than a Swiss army knife was probably ever intended to, and which Bucky spent about five minutes playing with, fascinated, before remembering he was in company and putting it away. Clint gave Natasha something in a tiny box that made her grin and shake her head, and she, it turned out, had gotten him lawn darts. ("I don't have a lawn," Clint said, "but I'm sure I'll find a use for these.") After all the presents had been distributed, though, the agreement was universal: The cinnamon rolls were actually the best present of all.

"They are like sex," Clint said with his mouth half full, and Steve glanced at Bucky dubiously.

"Whoa," said Tony. "Did you see that look? _Did you see that look?_ " He pointed between Steve and Bucky, his finger jabbing the air to emphasize his words. "That was the look of somebody who is having sex that is definitely better than those cinnamon rolls." He looked at Bruce for confirmation, and Bruce just nodded, although his expression was pained.

"You said you didn't want to know," Bucky said, leaning his head against Steve's shoulder.

"I don't," said Tony. "I don't want to know, but that look just told me everything anyway."

+++

By the time they made it back up to their floor, it was getting on evening, and the sun had already set. The shortest day of the year was behind them, Bucky knew, but the lengthening of the days was hardly measurable yet, the nighttime still unreasonably early. He thought he could remember being on a mission where the sun never set, but that could have been simply an illusion perpetuated by the constant illumination of fluorescent lights in a base somewhere.

He was tired, worn out from celebrating, looking forward to just sitting with Steve and being quiet and content in each other's company. Maybe they'd watch a movie - there were so many Christmas movies that they had missed, always so much to catch up on. Maybe they would both be playing catch-up for the rest of their lives.

Instead, as soon as they were inside and had both set aside the gifts they'd received, Steve said, "Wait here for a minute, okay? I'll be right back."

He hadn't thought that Steve had gotten anything; Steve didn't _need_ to get anything, Bucky couldn't possibly ask for or expect anything from Steve that was more than the indescribable immensity of what Steve had already given him. But Steve came back in a moment carrying a little package wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with twine, and he held it out to Bucky.

"What --" said Bucky, "Steve, you didn't need to --" but he took the package and sat down on the couch with it, his hands shaking a little as he untied the twine.

"I wanted to," Steve said quietly, and sat down next to Bucky. The paper fell open and revealed -- something impossible, something lost. Bucky put the back of his right hand against his mouth; the envelopes were yellowed with age, stained, clearly fragile, but --

"How did you find these," he managed, his voice barely more than a gasp. He picked the first letter up, Steve's familiar handwriting, Bucky's name on it. "These were, they were --"

"They were in your jacket," Steve said. "I went through -- I must have gone through the names of every guy in your regiment, honest to god. The woman, her name is Julie, she's the granddaughter of -- John Tuohey. She said that when your unit was captured, he said that your jacket came off --"

Here Bucky could remember the moment clearly: The men in the black helmets had him by the back of his coat, someone's hands fisted in the fabric, and he had yanked it open, pulled his arms out, in a desperate attempt to get free, the scabs falling away from his bruised knuckles as the sleeves knocked against them. It hadn't worked, they had gotten him anyway, but the jacket -- the jacket had been left behind -- a fact he had wryly regretted later, shivering in his damp cell --

"-- and he took the jacket. She said she didn't know if it was because he wanted to keep warm or what, he couldn't remember or he'd never say. But he found these and he saved them." Steve cleared his throat, as Bucky leafed through them. God, could he possibly put into words the sort of comfort these had given him? No, it would be stupid, trite, like Steve had later confessed that the letters felt when he was writing them. "She said at first he was just hoping to get them back to your family, or something like that, but later he realized who you were, after -- after we got you out of the base, and then he never had a chance to give them back."

He wouldn't have, Bucky thought a little hysterically. That time of his life had been so strangely compressed, especially when you compared it to the seventy years that came after, fleeting instances of consciousness (if you could call it that) tucked in amid long spans of darkness. "So he kept them, and then her mother kept them, and then she had them," Steve said. "The Smithsonian never got ahold of her or anything, so she was just -- waiting, I guess, for someone to come looking for them, and so I suppose I finally did."

There was an unfinished letter at the bottom of the stack in Bucky's own hand, a letter that cut off mid-sentence. Bucky licked his lips. His chin was trembling now too. He remembered -- Macauley, sitting next to him in the foxhole, smoking and shivering. "You're always writing, Sarge," said Macauley. "You got a girl back home?"

"No," Bucky had said, "Nothing steady, it's just -- my friend, he's like a brother to me, known him since we were kids. More family than family, you know?"

"Sure," said Macauley. "Probably best you ain't got a girl, honestly; I write to Rosie sometimes and I sit there thinking about her worrying over me, and hell if I don't feel guilty for it. I miss her, but I feel guilty too."

He'd shown Bucky a picture - Rosie, a pretty young woman, who seemed like a strange match for buck-toothed, crooked-nosed Macauley, but then Macauley was steady and calm in the thick of it and always had a gentle joke for the kids who were shaken up after, so there must be more to it than that. Bucky did feel guilty, though, guilty as hell and worried for leaving Steve behind, sick sometimes with the thought that he had seen Steve for maybe the last time. "You got nice handwriting," Macauley said, peering over. "Maybe I ought to have you write _my_ letters."

The letter stopped as Bucky had been writing, "Some mornings the air is so cold that all of our breath looks like fog, and I wonder how they do not see our position, as we must be puffing up enough smoke --" and he had meant to say that it looked like a dragon's cave. He had meant to tell Steve about how they had walked through a forest where all the boughs of the trees were weighed down with ice and when the sun had risen, it had shone like crystal. The good things. But he had been interrupted as they got the order to move out, and then he had seen Steve again, later, and by then the letter had been gone.

"Buck," said Steve, and he sounded worried. "Are you okay? I'm sorry, I -- I didn't know if --"

"It's just," said Bucky thickly, "a lot." He blinked, and his eyes were so full that two tears spilled over and ran down his cheeks as he did. "I wrote this," he said slowly, "thinking I'd never see you again, you know."

"I know," Steve said. His hand reached for Bucky's, tentative. "I know now."

Bucky set the letters aside, carefully, on the coffee table, his eyes lingering on them for a moment through the blur of tears. Steve's familiar handwriting, faded now. It had been so long ago, but it _had_ been real, and nothing and nobody could erase it. He reached for Steve and Steve took Bucky into his arms and held him close, and Bucky held Steve back, breathing shakily and dampening the shoulder of Steve's shirt with tears and hot breath. Eventually he managed to say, "Thank you," to Steve, and Steve said back, equally as shaky as Bucky felt, "You're welcome, Bucky," and, "I love you."

"I love you too," Bucky said, pulling back and resting his forehead against Steve's. _Too much,_ he thought, _I love you too much and I always have._

Steve leaned forward and took Bucky's face in his hands, and kissed him. Steve's cheeks were damp too, and Bucky kissed back, feeling raw, like all of his skin had been stripped off, like an exposed nerve ending. He laid back against the couch and Steve came with him, bracing himself above Bucky on his elbows as Bucky wrapped his legs around Steve's waist. They lay there like that for a while, trading slow, deep kisses, until Bucky felt hot and overstimulated. He could feel Steve's erection against his hip, and he thought -- he thought, _yes_ , and reached between them to undo Steve's pants.

Steve sat back a little and looked at Bucky in surprise, but he was pink in the face and his hips jerked when Bucky slid his hand inside and rubbed against his dick. He got with the picture admirably fast, and rucked Bucky's t-shirt up underneath his armpits, his big, callused hands dragging along Bucky's ribs and stomach, down to undo the button fly of Bucky's jeans.

He lifted up so he could pull them down, along with Bucky's underwear, and Bucky pulled Steve's pants down around his thighs as well. When Steve bent back down, he kissed Bucky again, bit at his lower lip, and reached between them to wrap his hand around them both.

They were going to make a mess on the couch. Bucky strained up into the touch, grabbing for Steve's hair with one hand and Steve's shirt with the other, his metal fingers tearing the fabric where it gathered at Steve's shoulder. He was still thinking of the enormity of it all, the sheer impossibility that he had somehow ended up here, and it made some kind of tight, almost painful feeling gather in his stomach and his chest, a tension that tightened and tightened as Steve's hand stroked them both. It felt like a thread, like he was being sewn up somehow, somewhere deep, maybe in his soul, if he had one of those at all, if anyone did.

What would he have said, then, all those years ago, if someone had tried to tell him the truth? If someone had seen his future and told him the tale? He would have laughed at them, even though he'd never been stupid, because the truth was, in this case, far more strange than any kind of science fiction he'd ever heard of. And maybe the truth about Steve, about what he was missing out on with Steve, about all those lonely years they would swim upstream without each other -- maybe that would have seemed like a cruel joke, but Bucky thought that he would have been too much a coward nonetheless to ever act on it.

Steve's teeth clicked against Bucky's, and Bucky thought he could taste blood, but it was -- he could always taste blood, somewhere on the back of his tongue, and probably always would. He gasped Steve's name when he had to come up for breath, or maybe that was just the form his breaths were taking these days, Steve, Steve, Steve --

He came all over Steve's hand and his own stomach, and the noise he made was a rabbitlike cry, a cry that sounded of pain but was meant to represent entirely the opposite. Steve came too, a minute later, and then he lowered himself carefully on top of Bucky, and Bucky stroked his back and his hair and they held onto each other, like they should have so many years in the past.

Steve's lips found his cheek, his chin, the corner of his mouth. "I missed you so much," he said. "I did, Bucky. I never want you to think any different."

"I didn't," Bucky said, which wasn't entirely true, because Bucky had a doubter's spirit, but that was Bucky's fault, not Steve's, so it wasn't as if Steve needed to know it anyway. Steve's mouth sought his after a moment, and he kissed Bucky so sweetly that Bucky knew -- he was trying to cleanse away all the sins of the past, all the hell that they'd wrought on each other, that the world had wrought on them. To cleanse them, but not to erase them -- never that.

+++

It was cold, and he was naked.

"Get him up, come on," said someone, and a hand closed around his right bicep, pulling him upright. He went malleably, shivering. "The goddamn cryo chamber's not ready yet --"

"What the fuck do you mean, it's not ready?" snapped another voice -- male, familiar. "They have one job to do; how the fuck can it not be ready? It's _critical_ that it's ready, he needs to be iced, he's been out too long already, he's starting to get erratic --"

This was, the soldier acknowledged, true. His behavior had been satisfactory until the end of the mission. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the mission had run longer than anticipated, and while the soldier had completed it successfully, as ordered, he was aware that his behavior had become strange in the last thirty to forty hours. His behavior was, doubtless, the reason for his current level of sedation, the reason that his limbs felt slow and sluggish.

"We have to find something to keep him occupied," said the first voice. "I don't have time to fucking sit and babysit him, and if we don't give him something to do, he's going to get more inconsistent."

The second one -- a man, dark hair, dark eyes -- grabbed his chin, and the soldier focused on him slowly, woozy. "Look at me," said the man. "You know who I am?"

"Commander," said the soldier; his voice was raspy, dry. His throat clicked when he swallowed, and his mouth hung open a little. 

"Good," said the commander. His eyes darted around the room, to the other people in it. He was slightly shorter than the soldier, which seemed for some reason incorrect, though the soldier could not trace that train of thought far enough to understand why. "I know you completed your mission, but I've got another one I need you to do, okay?"

The soldier knew somehow that this was an incorrect protocol, but he nodded, slowly, his mouth shaping the word "sir," although it came out a soundless exhalation of breath. "You don't have to baby-talk him, Rumlow," said the first man, and the commander, still holding onto the soldier's chin, whipped his head around.

"Shut the fuck up," he said. "I'm talking to him like Pierce talks to him, Pierce always gets the best response." From the back of the room, someone else said something -- _yeah, I bet_ , and there was a ripple of laughter.

"Listen to me," said the commander, and the soldier focused on him again. "You know where weapons storage is?"

The soldier nodded, swaying. "We're going to take you down there, and I want you to clean the weapons. I want you to clean them the best that you possibly can, and you keep doing it until someone comes to get you, understand? It's critical to the mission's success."

"Yes, sir," the soldier whispered, and the commander let go of his chin and slapped a hand against the door pad against the wall; the door slid open, and the soldier followed him wordlessly.

"We don't have time to babysit him," said the first man again.

"We won't have to," the commander said. "Once he gets the order, he'll follow it until someone tells him to stop. Trust me, I've seen it before. We'll leave him in there, lock the door, and he'll do what we say until the damn cryo chamber is ready." He turned, pointing a finger in what the soldier understood to be a threat display. "And I swear to god, when I find out who's responsible for this --"

There was -- an elevator. Mirrors. He could not look at his reflection. This base seemed to be built inefficiently for military operations of any kind. The vertical structure was not conducive to quick evacuation. A building this tall would make an obvious target. "Sir?" someone's voice was saying, someone who must be talking to the commander, someone with a foreign accent. "Sir?" --

\-- The commander -- or -- the soldier? No, not the soldier. The soldier was only to use his biometrics in the event of an emergency, or when returning to base in the event that the rest of his team had been eliminated --

The commander pushed his thumb against another door pad, and the door opened to reveal a room that was familiar to the soldier, full of racks and racks of weaponry. He stood, uncertainly, unsure of where to start. "Start with that one," the commander said, pointing. "Work your way around, counterclockwise, until someone tells you to stop."

"Yes," said the soldier, "sir. Acknowledged."

The room was cold. The soldier retrieved a weapon, an M16, and materials with which to clean it. There was nowhere to sit except the floor, so he sat on the floor. The room was empty -- he could not remember hearing the door open again, or the rest of the men leaving, but the room was empty now --

He had to be careful with his left hand. Getting too much gun oil into the apparatus would cause it to malfunction, and repairing it, he had been told, was difficult and time consuming. It would result in punishment, and the soldier did not want to be punished. He would perform the task he had been given. It was of no consequence that he was cold, that his naked flesh goosepimpled in the air -- in fact, this was simply another sign that he was erratic, that he needed to be wiped, or put into what the commander had referred to at the beginning of the mission as "cold storage." It was in no way relevant to the current mission.

He stripped the weapon. He cleaned the weapon. He replaced it neatly to where he had found it, and moved on to the next.

Some time passed. A slight tremor, a shiver, had started up in the soldier's body, in his core. It did not compromise the activity he was performing, but made it more difficult, and was worrying; it was yet another sign of malfunction. More worrying, however, was the knot at the pit of the soldier's stomach. A feeling that something -- was wrong.

He could not say why, did not understand. But the longer he sat there on the floor, the more it crept inside, clutching him, insidious. A sick sense of dread. Fear, which the soldier was not meant to feel at all unless he disobeyed orders. In fact, the soldier was not meant to feel much: Cold satisfaction, perhaps, upon the completion of a mission. Fear of punishment. Beyond that --

It had its tendrils in him now, though, a parade of ruthless, faceless memories where there was nothing clear except for pain, fear, torment, and then -- shame, humiliation, misery. The disgust in the man's voice: "I don't have time to babysit him." Disappointment on another man's face, an older man, his hair blonde, a pit of terror welling in the soldier's belly. 

It seized him so that it felt like a stab of pain, and he rocked forward, curling in on himself. This, too, was an improper response; unless an injury was mission critical, he was trained to keep going, to ignore the hurt and move on.

He thought: Soon they will be unable to repair me. I will be unable to operate without malfunctioning. I will be decommissioned.

Decommissioning -- what would it mean? Perhaps simply to fall into an inky pit of blackness and never resurface, and he thought -- that would not be so bad. He could remember now the sensation of waking, the awful shock of it, pain all over, hands holding him down. The fear, though he didn't know where the fear came from; it seemed that maybe the fear was there, always all around, waiting for a crack, a chink in the armor through which it could invade.

He turned the weapon he was holding around and around in his hands -- a pistol. The limits of the soldier's healing capabilities had never been fully tested. One of the surest ways to inflict a lethal wound was with a direct shot to the head, especially one that would render the brainstem, and therefore the autonomous nervous system functions, inoperable. Was this, he wondered, how they might decommission him?

His heart rate had increased. An increased heart rate would lead to a higher rate of blood loss as the heart pumped its viscera out faster and faster, until -- until nothing, which -- nothing would -- surely be better than -- than what, he couldn't say, couldn't remember, didn't know, had nothing except the feeling of certainty --

The soldier healed exceptionally fast. He would have only one opportunity. He tested the weight of the pistol. Perhaps -- perhaps the heart would be better. No -- the idea lacked -- something, a strange sense of satisfaction that the soldier should have had no concept of at all.

He opened his mouth.

Alarms blared somewhere -- but far away, far away; nobody could know what he was doing. There were no -- cameras -- were there cameras? --

He put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth. It tasted like very little, only cold metal. He had the sudden urge to close his eyes, though he did not know why.

"Sergeant," said a voice from somewhere above him, and he looked up but could not see anyone; he was alone, and if he was having auditory hallucinations, then perhaps he was farther gone than he thought. He did close his eyes, but opened them again, because the voice continued, tinny and grating, almost metallic, saying something he could not understand over the ringing in his own ears.

"Bucky," someone said urgently, "Bucky, I -- Bucky, please put it down, please, Bucky--"

Bucky was an incorrect callsign. The soldier had never been referred to as "Bucky," which meant that whoever it was, was -- unauthorized. "Please," said the man. He sounded very upset, desperate even. "Bucky, please, it's me --"

The soldier rolled his eyes slowly in the other man's direction. "Bucky," said the man, and his hands reached out for the soldier, shaking, and he took the gun with one of them, and the other landed on Bucky's face. "Bucky, please look at me," said Steve.

He was -- he was in the weapons storage room at Stark Tower, naked, sitting on the floor. There were tools lying neatly next to him all lined up in a row, ready to be used, and -- Steve's face, terrified, tracked with tears. Bucky blinked at him in confusion, looked behind him to see Dr. Banner looking scared and shaken in his pajamas, holding a syringe, and the lights were flashing, and the alarms weren't far away at all; it was all right here.

He covered his ears, and let out a low moan, and then what had been a faint shiver in the dream was, in reality, him shaking uncontrollably all over, his teeth chattering. "Bucky," said Steve, "Bucky, Bucky, what's -- I don't understand, Bucky --" and he put his arms around Bucky, but it didn't help the shaking, just made Steve shake too.

Dr. Banner came a little closer, and he said, "Steve, I think we should --" and held up the syringe.

"How do you even know it's going to work?" Steve hissed out, sounding exhausted and angry and still terrified.

"It's going to work," Banner said. "Trust me, I have experience with it."

"No," Steve said, "I won't let you," his hands cradling Bucky's head, his fingers stroking wildly, almost painfully, through Bucky's tangled hair. "I won't let you --"

"Steve," Bucky croaked, "Let him do it."

Steve jerked, and pulled away a little, just enough that Dr. Banner could get in and press the needle against Bucky's neck. He could feel it immediately -- everything got very heavy, so heavy, and he turned toward Steve, ready to fall asleep in Steve's arms. It wasn't until he was turning his face against Steve's chest and going limp and numb that he remembered he needed to tell Steve --

"I didn't want to leave you," he tried to say, but it came out leaden, just an unintelligible blur of nonsense syllables slipping out of his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brief discussion of the symptoms of illness, including vomiting, during the second scene. In the last scene, while sleepwalking, Bucky begins to re-enact a memory of a suicide attempt he made while in Hydra's captivity but is interrupted before he can harm himself; this scene is fairly long and contains detailed descriptions of suicidal ideation.


	7. convalescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year! Please see notes at the end of the chapter for specific warnings. :)

He woke up in the hospital.

When he turned his head, he could see Steve, uncomfortably asleep in a chair he'd pulled up beside the bed. "Steve," he said, and Steve's eyes opened immediately, though it wasn't necessarily an improvement - Steve looked haunted, and exhausted, his dark circles as deep as they ever got these days.

Steve didn't say anything in response, just scooted the chair closer and took Bucky's hand in both of his own, leaning forward until his forehead was resting against their joined fingers. He stayed there for about a minute, long enough that Bucky was starting to feel fidgety and awkward, and then he finally lifted his head again, tears in his eyes.

"How are you feeling?" he asked. He sounded terrible. Broken.

"I'm fine," Bucky said. He felt like shit, but in minor ways that hardly even registered anymore - dry mouth, rolling stomach, head pounding. He shifted his hand, reached out to touch Steve's head, running his fingers through Steve's hair, over the curve of his skull. "I'm sorry."

"It wasn't your fault," Steve said tiredly.

"I didn't say it was my fault," Bucky answered, snappish, and then made himself cool down a little. "I know it's not my fault. I said I was sorry, and I am sorry. I'm sorry it happened."

_I'm sorry you had to see it,_ he thought. _I'm sorry you're the one dealing with it._ Steve didn't say anything for a moment, and then he picked up Bucky's hand again and brought it to his lips, kissing Bucky's knuckles. "I just can't lose you again," he said, and there was a certain cold determination in his voice that scared the hell out of Bucky.

"I know," Bucky said. "I know." He ran his free hand through his hair. "How long was I asleep?"

"About a day," Steve said. "The tranquilizer Bruce gave you was meant to work on him, so it -- knocked you out pretty good." He looked at Bucky, and Bucky could tell he wanted to be able to manage a smile, but couldn't quite. "You must be hungry. I can get the nurses to bring you something."

He started to get up, to go get one of the nurses, and Bucky remembered, and said, "Steve, wait." When Steve turned around, he said, very slowly and clearly, "I wasn't trying to kill myself. I didn't want to leave you."

Steve nodded once. "It's -- pretty clear on the surveillance footage," he said. "That you were sleepwalking. But thank you for saying it."

He left, and Bucky leaned back against the awful hospital pillows, looking up at the ceiling and listening to the plates of his arm settle and resettle. He didn't know what to say; there was nothing you could say, really, to make this better. There was nothing he could do, either -- even the satisfaction of finding Rumlow and grinding his face into the pavement until he was a smear of red jelly wouldn't have done anything to ease the string pulled tight inside of him.

He remembered what had happened after that: It had been a memory, after all, and Rumlow had come back just as he had been putting the gun in his mouth, between his teeth. And he had pulled it right back out, terrified of what they would do to him if he was caught, and Rumlow had just looked at the pistol, wet and shiny with spit, and said, "What the _fuck_ do you think you're doing?"

And then they had beat him, and wiped him, and put him back in cryo until he was deemed necessary again. Nobody except him knew how close he had come to oblivion, and even he had not remembered it until now.

He wondered how many more of these memories would come back to him, in time.

When Steve came back in, he had a nurse with him, and she checked Bucky's vitals and smiled at him and asked him what he wanted to eat. He said, "I don't know, something easy on the stomach."

Steve sat next to him in silence for a while, until the nurse brought back a bowl of oatmeal, and Bucky ate it as slowly as he could manage, but couldn't stop gulping water along with it. When he was done, he set the tray off to the side and looked over at Steve, who was watching him, a picture of misery, even though Bucky was all right, Bucky was alive. "When do you think they'll let me out of here?" he asked Steve.

"I don't know," Steve said. "They ran some tests while you were out, but I think they want to do a sleep study, and." He paused, looking down at his own hands. "They'll want you to talk to someone, you know."

Bucky licked his lips. "I figured," he said. He looked at Steve, and let a little of his own misery show through the mask of blankness, and said, "I want to go home."

Steve's face twisted, his mouth screwing up and his eyebrows drawing together, and then he said, "JARVIS woke me up."

"What?" Bucky asked him.

"JARVIS woke me up," Steve said. "JARVIS was watching you. You went down in the elevator to the weapons room, and you didn't respond when he was talking to you. He figured out something was wrong, and he woke me and Dr. Banner and sent us down to you." He smiled, a terrible sad smile. "So in a way, JARVIS saved your life."

"I guess I'll have to thank him," Bucky said.

+++

Steve left eventually when somebody convinced him to go home and get some real sleep, and several more rounds of nurses came in to check on him, and then Pepper came by, in the evening, as visiting hours were about to end. His door was open, so he saw her coming, with a big bouquet of red and orange flowers. "Jesus," he said, pained, as she set the vase down on the table next to him. It was one thing for Steve to see him this way, but --

She scooted the chair close to the bed again, and reached out to lay one of her small, cool hands on top of his. Bucky could hardly stand to look at her, but when he did, there was something comforting about the fact that she looked as put-together as she ever did, her red-gold hair pulled back with a few strands curling around her face, her white dress immaculate and smart.

"I don't know if you know this," she said, "but somebody took me and did something to me, too, once."

He did know it, but he'd never heard her mention it before. "I still have dreams about it," she continued. "I don't know if I'll ever stop having dreams about it. And afterward, for a while, I thought, what's the point in even pretending, when someone could just come anytime they wanted, and take you, and change you?" She smiled a little. "And if you know me, you know that's really out-of-character for me. But that's how it was."

Bucky didn't say anything, just kept looking at her, and she looked up and met his eyes. "Sometimes after I dream about it, I wonder, is it better, or worse, because it was real? Is it better that it's not just something that I made up? Is it better that it really happened?" She shook her head. "And I don't know. I still don't know. But I do know how that feels."

"Thank you," Bucky said, very quiet. He was always thanking her for something, it seemed.

"You don't have to thank me," she said. "Just tell me if there's anything you need. If there's anything I can do, if there's anything any of us can do." She smiled again, lopsided, her thumb stroking across the back of his hand. "And I know that there might not be anything, but it's important to me that I at least make the offer. That you know you can ask."

Bucky nodded. "You look tired," Pepper said. "You should get some rest. And call me if you need me to sue anyone, all right?"

"Sure, boss," Bucky said, and managed a small smile back for her. She sat with him for another minute, and then she got up and left, and Bucky was tired, but he didn't sleep at all that night.

+++

The next morning, the doctor came to see him. The doctor was a man in maybe his mid-forties, with dark hair greying at the temples and a serious expression. "The good news is that the tests we ran all showed no abnormalities that would be responsible for this event," he said to Bucky. "Which means the bad news is that we're not certain what the culprit is. Captain Rogers said you have no history of sleepwalking."

"That's correct," Bucky said.

"And also no history of suicidal behavior."

Bucky smiled a little.

"Is that funny?" the doctor asked him.

"I don't have a history of suicidal behavior that Steve knows of," he said, "because I haven't ever been suicidal before or after I spent about seventy years as --" he didn't know what to say there. Prisoner seemed like more than what he had been; a prisoner implied he had some will to defy them, which he hadn't. And 'in captivity' made him sound like a zoo animal, a bear performing in the fucking circus. "Before or since Hydra had me," he settled on.

"Can you describe to me what happened, then?" the doctor asked. He'd sat down in a chair, a different chair, not the one that Steve and Pepper had sat in. He had out Bucky's chart now and was making notes on it.

"I was having a dream, I guess," Bucky said. "It was a memory, of something that happened, and I was -- going to try and kill myself so I wouldn't have to -- go through -- what they did to me anymore." By the end of the sentence he felt sick, and his hands had clenched by his sides. He forced them to relax.

"Do you often have dreams of past events?" the doctor asked.

Bucky laughed and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "Yes," he said.

"And those dreams cause you distress?"

"They're pretty distressing," Bucky said, staring up at the ceiling.

"Okay." The doctor sat back. "And would you say that those dreams occur with any particular pattern? Are there any events in your daily life that maybe cause the dreams to happen more frequently?"

If he thought Bucky was stupid enough that he hadn't figured it out by now -- "Stress, I guess," Bucky said. "Anxiety, things that -- make me anxious, it means I'm more likely to have a dream."

"And do you often feel feelings of stress or anxiety?" The doctor glanced up, over his glasses, just in time for Bucky to catch his eye incredulously.

"I don't know," Bucky said flippantly. "Define 'often.'" He stopped for a moment, and then, just as the doctor was about to say something else, he said, "I spent seventy years being tortured, of course I feel -- stress and anxiety when I'm doing just about anything that isn't sitting on the fucking couch or laying in bed, is that what you want me to say?"

"I don't 'want' you to say anything," the doctor said. He seemed maybe a little perturbed. "Do you have any kind of activities that you do to relieve the stress and anxiety?"

_I have sex with Steve,_ Bucky thought. "Can we not talk about this right now?" he asked. "I wasn't trying to kill myself. I don't _want_ to kill myself. What I want is to go home."

"All right," the doctor said, flipping papers over on his clipboard and standing up. "I'd like to schedule you for a sleep study, just to rule out any kind of abnormalities in your sleep patterns. I'm going to check with the sleep lab to see what they have open and I'll come back later."

"Thanks," Bucky said flatly, and went back to staring at the ceiling.

Steve came in about half an hour later, carrying a couple of cups of coffee, and Bucky sat up and reached for one immediately. Steve handed it to him, and he took the top off and inhaled the scent immediately.

"You haven't had breakfast yet?" Steve asked, frowning, and hit the nurse call button before Bucky could protest. He sat down on the edge of Bucky's bed and looked down at Bucky, sipping his own coffee.

"They're going to hate you if you keep that up," said Bucky, shifting and trying to keep his hospital gown from pulling off his shoulder.

Steve shrugged. "I'm kind of hoping we won't be here a lot longer," he said, and Bucky could certainly agree with that. "Did you talk to your doctor yet?"

"Yeah," Bucky said, taking a swallow of coffee. "He was here this morning."

Steve raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Bucky said, "I don't know, no news except he wants to do a sleep study." He paused, swallowed another swig of coffee, and then said, even though it hurt him to say it, "Which means I'm actually going to be required to sleep at some point, which -- could be -- a problem."

"You didn't sleep last night?" Steve said, looking more closely at Bucky, and Bucky mutely shook his head. Steve sighed and ran a hand over his face, "Buck, I --"

"You don't need to say anything," Bucky said. "There's not a goddamn thing you can do about it, so, you don't --"

"I don't want to leave you here," Steve snapped. "Every time I drive away without you -- you don't know how that feels. So can you -- could you try?"

Bucky shifted, looked away from Steve for a minute, and then back at him again. "Sure, Steve," he said. "I'll try."

_You think I want to be here?_ he thought, knowing full well that Steve knew he didn't. He set his jaw and ground his teeth together to keep himself from saying something mean, and after about a minute when he looked over at Steve, he could tell Steve was trying not to cry. It was an expression Steve had had since childhood, an expression that had never really changed. "Christ," he said, setting the cup of coffee aside and holding out his arms. "Come here, just come here."

Steve crumpled into his arms, fumbling his own coffee onto the table beside Bucky's bed too, and that was how the nurse found them when she came in - Steve with his head tucked under Bucky's chin, the two of them fitting poorly onto the hospital bed.

Steve pulled away, guilty, and Bucky could tell from the way that he kept looking out the window rather than at the nurse that he was trying to put himself back together. Bucky ordered some toast and eggs and a glass of orange juice, and then waited for Steve to look at him again once the nurse had left. "I'm sorry," Steve said, "It's just really hard not -- having you at home right now." He took a breath, running a hand through his hair and leaving it standing askew. "I called Sam to see if he could come up for a few days."

"Yeah?" Bucky asked.

"Yeah," Steve said. "I don't -- I didn't know how long you'd be in here, so I thought -- having somebody else around might help."

"Sure," said Bucky, ashamed and bitter at the twist of angry jealousy in his stomach, and beyond that, the knowledge that he was the one who had made Steve feel this way, and that he couldn't make it any better. "That's good. Sam's -- he's a nice person. He'll be glad to help."

"Yeah," Steve said. His voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper. Then he said, "Was it the letters?"

"What?" Bucky asked.

"Was it the letters?" Steve said. "Did -- was that what made you --"

Bucky looked up at the ceiling. No wasn't the right answer, and neither was yes; the truth was somewhere in the murky in-between. "Not -- entirely," he said. "It had -- it started a while before that. I should have seen it coming."

"Last time something happened was right after I came home," Steve said. "And after you went shopping with Pepper, and you said it was busy." He looked down at his hands, and then at Bucky again. "So I thought it might be that I had given you the letters, because I could tell you were --"

"It wasn't just the letters," Bucky said. "It wasn't your fault. And it doesn't matter, because -- what am I going to do, just stop doing -- anything, and stay at home all the time?" He laughed bitterly.

"I don't -- no, Bucky, I'm not saying that's what you should do." Steve looked at him. "At the party, when you had to go to the bathroom. What happened?"

"The last Christmas party I went to, they drugged me to the gills so they could show me off," Bucky said blandly. He didn't know what Steve was hoping to achieve by this, but if he wanted the truth, then so be it.

Steve looked sick, all the color draining from his face. There was a long, long span of uncomfortable silence between them, during which a nurse came back and brought the tray of Bucky's food and checked his vitals and then left again. Bucky determinedly started eating, even though it tasted like clay in his mouth. "I don't know how you do any of it," Steve said, eventually. "I don't know how you stand it."

Bucky chewed and swallowed a piece of toast. "I don't have much of a choice," he said.

+++

The doctor came back and asked Bucky some more questions later that afternoon. By that time Bucky was so tired that he was barely there at all. He could tell the doctor knew something was wrong, that he wasn't himself, but none of the things the doctor said could snap him out of it. He didn't have the energy to be angry. He didn't have the energy to be anything other than compliant, and that was a familiar state of affairs.

They had been able to schedule the sleep study for that evening. Bucky had a feeling that being famous probably helped with that, if famous was really the right word for it. It didn't matter. "I'm not allowed to have any -- sedatives, right?" he asked, already knowing the answer even as he did.

"I'm afraid not," the doctor said. "We need to see natural sleep patterns for this, so giving you any kind of sleep aid would defeat the purpose."

"All right," Bucky said, looking up at the ceiling again.

Steve had left to go pick Sam up from the airport, and the two of them came back in the late afternoon. "Hey, man," Sam said gently when he came in, but he, at least, was smiling. He didn't look as tired as Steve, as worn-thin as Bucky felt. He didn't ask how Bucky was doing, which was a welcome respite; instead, he mostly sat and talked to Bucky, told him about how Christmas had been with his mom and his sister, his sister's husband and kids, and Bucky was relieved just to sit there and listen. They left when visiting hours were over; Steve leaned over before he left, stroking Bucky's hair back, and kissed him on the forehead, and maybe, just maybe, a tiny knot untied itself a little somewhere inside of Bucky.

He had some terrible salisbury steak for dinner, the kind of thing that tasted like it had been completely pre-made and then dumped out in one quivering mass onto his plate, and then an hour or so later they came to get him for the sleep study.

By this time at least he had a thin pair of pants to go with the hospital gown, which was probably more than he'd come to the hospital wearing. It didn't really matter to him in more than a perfunctory, vaguely amusing sense. A lot of people had seen him in various states of undress by now. His naked body was just another object in his life: Sometimes it belonged to him, and sometimes it didn't.

The sleep study rooms were made to feel a little more like actual bedrooms than the hospital rooms, but it didn't particularly seem that way to Bucky, as they attached all the tiny electrodes all over his body. He could feel his heart beating faster than it should, and he thought to himself, _please, not this, not tonight. Please just let this be normal,_ as if wishing had ever helped before.

Everyone left him alone in the false bedroom, and he curled up on his side and wished for Steve, pathetically, in the dark. Nothing about this place felt real, and the attempt at illusion in fact only made him more uneasy. He blinked into the dark and wondered about the people watching him: What were they thinking? How much did they know?

Some time during the night he did actually fall asleep, though it was a fitful and uneasy sleep. He woke several times, surprised and scared, momentarily disoriented, but made himself go back to sleep again upon realizing where he was, and why. By the time morning came and someone came back into the little room to take off all the electrodes, he could only hope he'd slept enough to give them the results they needed.

They took him back to his own room, where Pepper's flowers were waiting, looking bright and cheerful in the otherwise aggressively beige color scheme of the hospital, and he walked around the room for a while before getting back in bed, just to feel like he'd done something, anything at all.

+++

"We're discharging you this evening," said the doctor. "Not because I'm not concerned, but because I trust that you have more than enough resources at your home to keep you safe should you have another episode, and because I do believe that you are not suicidal."

He looked at Bucky over his glasses, as if he was expecting Bucky to be delighted. "I'd like you to consider seeing a therapist," he said. "I think you would benefit from developing behavioral techniques to keep you from reaching a point of crisis again, since, as you astutely noted, stress is impossible to avoid."

"Thanks," Bucky said. "I'll think about it."

The doctor looked at him, and sighed, shaking his head. He very much looked like he wanted to say something stern to Bucky, to chastise him, to tell him: Look at what you're doing to the people around you, the people who care about you. But Bucky already knew that, and he was at least grateful that the doctor had the sense _not_ to say it, because he was pretty sure getting in a fight with your doctor was frowned upon, and he did want to leave.

He didn't really have anything to take with him, so he was glad when Steve showed up with a bag of clothes for him, even if it was just sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a sweater. "I thought you'd want something comfortable," Steve said, and Bucky nodded, shucking out of the hospital clothes and pulling his own back on.

Steve had driven a car over that must have been one of Tony's, because it was more flashy than anything that Steve would ever care to own, and also immediately recognizable as _not_ one of the Stark Industries fleet. He slid into the passenger seat and leaned back against the leather headrest, Pepper's flowers cradled in his lap. He reached out, after a moment, to put one hand on top of Steve's.

They rode back to the tower in silence. Bucky didn't have much to say; he was tired, relieved to be going home, and mostly -- he just didn't know any words that would make it better. When they got back to their apartment, Sam was there. "Wow," he said, about the flowers, from his position leaning against the sofa with his arms folded.

"Pepper," Bucky said by way of explanation, setting them down on the kitchen table and going to get a glass of water.

"Welcome back, man," Sam said, leaving the living room and passing by, putting his hand on Bucky's back, right in between his shoulder blades. Bucky thought it was kind of funny - Sam didn't even live here, but here he was, welcoming Bucky home.

"Thanks," he said, and then turned to watch Steve as Steve hung his jacket and keys up, and came over to get a glass of water too, and stand next to Bucky. After a minute of Sam just looking at them both, the silence got a little awkward, and Sam cleared his throat.

"I'm just gonna turn in for the night," he said. "I'll see the two of you tomorrow. Steve, we on for a run?"

"Sure," Steve said. "Six-thirty. I'll be up."

"All right," Sam said. "Good night, guys." He headed down the hall, and Bucky realized that Steve must have given him the second bedroom - the bedroom that had been Bucky's at first, until it became very clear that Bucky wasn't planning on using it for sleeping or anything else. His stuff was all cleared out of there by now, and it was pretty obviously a guest room at this point, but something about it was still a little strange. Maybe he was just still used to thinking of the space as his, there if he needed it, even though he never did.

He watched Sam's retreating back, the easy confidence of his walk, the way his shoulders rolled. Sam was perhaps the most graceful of any of them at bearing the scars of the things that had happened to him, and Bucky envied him for it, though Sam had said to him before that it had been hard work getting there.

When he looked away from Sam, he could feel Steve watching him, and he turned slightly to meet Steve's gaze. Steve's hand came up after a moment, to cup his jaw and cheek, his thumb stroking over Bucky's cheekbone. Bucky needed to shave, he needed a shower, and he was fucking _tired_ ; he'd slept maybe four hours in the past two nights, which should have been more than enough - god knew the soldier had run on less than that for far longer - but instead left him feeling pulled thin like taffy. A dangerous feeling.

He leaned into Steve's touch and closed his eyes. "I think I'm pretty much ready for bed too," he said, quietly, after a minute.

"Okay," Steve said, taking his empty water glass from him and putting it in the sink. His hand came back after a moment, stroking over Bucky's face and hair.

Bucky felt shy and maybe more scared than he had around Steve in a while. It reminded him uncomfortably of those tentative first baby-deer steps they'd taken toward each other, clumsy and awkward, but he knew what he wanted and there was, at least, the certainty of knowing Steve felt the same way. So he leaned in for a kiss, and was gratified when Steve pulled him in close, kissing Bucky so thoroughly that it was almost like he thought he could heal whatever was wrong with Bucky just by kissing him. And maybe he could.

+++

He slept fine. It took a long time to get there, but with Steve next to him, his body heat lulling Bucky into a daze, he made it, and once he was there, there he stayed. In bed. No walking, no waking, no nightmares. He woke up the next morning just before Steve did, and didn't want to let go.

Steve kissed him and stroked his hair with heavy hands, and he sighed and eventually untwisted his limbs from around Steve, because he could remember that Steve had told Sam they'd go running. He fell asleep again, even without Steve, and woke up to the sound of the door opening as they came back in.

The shower turned on a minute later, and he got up and crept over, into the bathroom, careful to avoid Sam's eyeline where Sam was sitting in the kitchen drinking orange juice and opening up the paper. Steve looked surprised when he saw Bucky - he was hardly even sweating, as he peeled off his shirt and running tights. Bucky climbed into the shower without saying a word, and waited for Steve to join him.

Nothing happened - of course it didn't, not with Sam right there in the other room. And besides, Bucky wasn't quite sure he was feeling up to it; he felt a curious _lacking_ inside, an absence where he knew a yawning chasm of desire would be ordinarily, but instead of that, there was just -- exhaustion, maybe. If exhaustion felt like a void. Neither of them made any attempt to hide the fact that they both came out of the bathroom at the same time, though and Sam gave them a slightly scandalized look, but he didn't say anything.

Bucky went to put on coffee, figuring that it would help the whole situation immensely.

Steve leaned against him as they sat at the kitchen table, and Bucky took the arts section from the paper and gave it to him, or rather, to both of them, spreading it out so they could both read it. Nobody said anything, but Bucky could feel Sam observing them, his gaze heavy, though without judgment, as far as Bucky could tell. "Tony's probably doing something for New Year's Eve," Steve said eventually when he got up to pour them all cups of coffee. "I haven't checked my e-mail in a few days."

"Me neither," Bucky said wryly. He was, truthfully, not sure that he'd be able to handle anything that soon anyway, but that was a bridge they'd cross when they came to it.

They sat and drank their coffee, and then Bucky got up and made everyone eggs, bacon, and toast. Sam had some work to do, and Steve finally did check his e-mail, and then they decided they'd go out for lunch. Bucky declined, feeling like a hibernating animal who'd been woken up too soon, and reluctantly they left him alone. It was kind of surprising to him that almost half the day had passed already. He didn't know where it had gone. He didn't know where he'd been for all of it.

He sat on the couch and turned on the tv for a while, and watched the news. It wasn't the best decision; sometimes the news made him want to stop breathing, and the worst thing about it was that unlike a movie or a book, it was all really happening out there. Out there somewhere, far away from this person Bucky had become who sometimes could barely stand leaving home.

It reminded him of earlier times. There had been this idea, at some point, that maybe the war was actually doing something, that injustice would for once and all be confronted and destroyed, but anyone who had really been in the war had found out that wasn't true. It seemed to be less true now than ever, when most people lived lives of relative safety and comfort, but the injustice had become sneakier; it was the sort of thing that invaded your life a little bit at a time and just slowly tinted everything, until you realized one day that the whole world was a different color than it used to be. And Bucky didn't know if it was that Steve didn't notice -- how could he not? Steve had always been thinner-skinned than most to those particular things, had a lot of practice being the one on the receiving end of injustice -- or if Steve couldn't stand it either.

In the end it was just a useless loop of thoughts for him to get trapped in, and he had plenty of those already without adding to the menagerie. He turned off the TV.

"JARVIS," he said.

"Yes, sir?" the answer came immediately.

"Thank you," Bucky said. "For the other night. Steve told me what you did." He could remember it vaguely, the sirens that had been far away and then abruptly right in his ear, the emergency lights flashing.

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. "I am only sorry that I did not react sooner and that my countermeasures were unsuccessful in awakening you."

Bucky shifted onto his side and scratched his arm. "I've been home for almost a whole day and you haven't said anything to me yet," he said. It was a dumb thing to say. A thinking-out-loud thing to say.

"The opportune moment did not arise, sir," JARVIS said. "I thought it indelicate to interrupt. And I thought perhaps it would be better to leave you and Captain Rogers some peace and quiet, considering."

Bucky hummed. "How did you know I was sleepwalking?" he asked, instead of delving further into that particular line of thought.

"Your vital signs registered the fact that you were still asleep, sir," JARVIS said. "In addition, visual monitoring revealed that your eye movements followed a pattern of reaction to persons or objects who were not present. In layman's terms, you were looking at things that were not there."

Bucky could only imagine how incredibly jarring that must look on tape, and for Steve to have watched -- "Did Steve ask you to see it?" he asked. "Or did you just -- show him?"

"Captain Rogers asked me what my opinion was on the matter," JARVIS said. "I told him what I have just told you, and then he requested to see the security footage. There was no protocol in place which would have denied him access. Was I wrong to have allowed him to see it? He seemed quite convinced afterward that my assessment was correct."

Bucky closed his eyes, and then opened them again. "No," he said. "You weren't wrong. He should -- you're right. There was no reason not to show him. I just don't like the idea of him seeing it."

"I have an extensive library of evidence which suggests you are uncomfortable with the idea of others witnessing you in moments you consider vulnerable," JARVIS said. "However, I have no evidence to suggest that anyone who has witnessed such a moment considers you weak, or pitiable."

"JARVIS," Bucky said, "this isn't one of those things that you can logic your way out of, you know?" He tilted his head back against the arm of the couch, letting his hair spill over. "Believe me, if I could just tell myself how it ought to work and have it be true, I'd do it in a goddamn heartbeat. But that's not -- not how people work."

"I am aware of that, sir," JARVIS said. "I am not ignorant to the fact that all of my previous attempts have been unsuccessful. But perhaps someday, if I present enough evidence, I will encounter a different outcome."

Bucky smiled a little. "An optimist," he said.

"I am a realist, sir," JARVIS replied, and Bucky could have sworn that he sounded a bit wry. "The laws of probability and human behavior suggest I am correct."

"Probability and human behavior," Bucky repeated, running his hand over his face. "Well, anyway, thank you. For what you did. You saved my life, I think."

"Certainly, sir," JARVIS said. "I am happy to have done so."

Was he? Bucky wondered. Was 'happy' a thing that JARVIS understood, or -- even a loose approximation of it? Surely he would have done it for anybody else, if the situation were to arise. Maybe he was getting off, in a weird way, on watching over somebody so fucked-up that they'd sleepwalk their way to a gun between the teeth. That he _could_ save, now that Tony was better than Bucky wasn't supposed to know he'd used to be.

No. That was giving him too much credit; that was all Bucky, that was all the guy who'd spent the better part of those many lost years searching for a little kindness, only to find that when it did come, it was just to give him something to look for. A light at the end of the tunnel. A hand to turn toward when they'd finished with him, to entice a different kind of obedience.

It made him angry. He couldn't even just accept kindness for what it was now, without his brain twisting it, looking for some ulterior motive. He'd seen too much of the underbelly of human nature for any kind of blind acceptance of anything other than pain and fear. But there it was: At least anger was something. At least anger was better than nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter continues from where the last left off, and as such contains discussion of past suicidal thoughts and behaviors throughout.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who is reading! We are coming to the end, my friends. You can also visit me on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/), where you will find a myriad of treasures, including Bucky in a bikini. (Is that an enticement or a warning? We may never know.)


	8. unlaced

He was about ten pages from the end of his chapter when his phone started buzzing, and when he looked at it, it was Tony calling. It seemed absurd; it was Tony's building, Tony's AI running it, hell, it was Tony's goddamn phone, might even be Tony's cellular network, too. But there it was, Tony Stark calling him on the phone.

"Yeah?" he answered.

"Oh good, you are home," Tony said, although Bucky thought, _where the fuck else would I be, or did you not know I even came back from the hospital?_ before setting that irritable train of thought aside. "Hey, listen, can you come down to the uh, forty-third floor lab for a minute? I wanna ask you about something."

Bucky blinked. It must be his arm -- usually, when Tony wanted to talk to him about something, it turned out to be the arm. Once, very awkwardly, Steve, a conversation which had both started and ended precisely nowhere, because Bucky wasn’t even able to figure out what it was that Tony couldn't get around his own ego to ask about. "Sure," he said. "I'll be there in five minutes, okay?"

"Five minutes?" Tony asked. "What, are you naked? No, I'm kidding, five minutes is fine. See you then."

Bucky wasn't naked, but he was still in sweats. Sam and Steve had gone out again -- they went out together a lot lately since Sam was here, and Bucky knew it was because Steve needed somebody to talk to about Bucky that wasn't, well, Bucky. Didn't feel good, but Sam was at least good at distracting Steve. At least when Steve went out with Sam, he came home with a smile.

He sighed and set his book aside, got up and went to change into a pair of jeans and put some socks and shoes on. "You know where I'm going," he said to the elevator tiredly, and JARVIS obligingly took him down.

Tony was waiting for him at the door of the lab, which felt strange in itself. Usually when Bucky came down here, Tony was buried under screens and gadgetry, engrossed in whatever he was working on. "Hi," said Bucky, ducking his head a little and looking around. "So here I am."

"So here you are," Tony agreed. "C'mere, follow me." He led Bucky deeper into the lab, and Bucky let his eyes slide over the screens as they went, passively observing, gleaning what he could from them without much real effort. Eventually they stopped; Tony pulled up a rolling chair, and Bucky looked around for another one, then settled for just leaning against a desk with his arms folded, instead.

He was starting to feel like it wasn't just about his arm, and when Tony started to pull up a few screens, he realized that he was right. The data there had nothing to do with his arm. "I keep a pretty close eye on JARVIS," said Tony. "He's a pretty expensive piece of equipment -- that sounds bad, doesn't it. Well, anyway, he's expensive to run. He uses up a whole lot of energy, and he transmits and receives a whole lot of data. So I like to, you know, look around, occasionally, make sure that his processes are still as reasonably efficient as they can be. Not that I'm hurting for money, it's more an -- ehh --" He made a gesture with his hand, waving in the air. "It's a point of pride, I guess. Anyway."

Bucky didn't particularly like where this was going, but he knew better than to try and stop Tony, who squinted at the blue glowing lines on the screen in front of him. "It might not be obvious right away on a shorter timeline, but -- here we go." The lines compressed into what Bucky could clearly see was a 6-month view, and Tony's point became eminently, painfully clear.

"So, Junior's energy expenditure has taken a pretty significant hike," Tony said. "Which is fine, it's fine, he has some, you know, leeway to do things himself. But I noticed he's spending a lot of energy on you and Capsicle's floor. There are, if you look --" he shifted, grabbing another screen, "Extra security feeds, and he's actively monitoring you guys -- well, you specifically, if I'm being a hundred percent honest -- at times when he's _usually_ passively monitoring any of the rest of us."

"I --" Bucky started. He felt hot in the face but also freezing cold inside, a strange mixture of terror and humiliation. He didn't know what to say, though, and Tony just shook his head, cutting him off.

"You don't need to tell me what's going on. If he needs to be monitoring you, that's fine. JARVIS is here to do whatever the people who live here need him to do. I just want to make sure he's not, you know, spending his free time watching you sleep unnecessarily when he could be, say, solving global warming." Tony smirked up at Bucky, and then tossed the screens off to the side, where they flattened into another, larger screen.

The sense of humiliation subsided fairly rapidly into anger, which it had no right to, really; it was Tony's tower, they were living here off his kindness, and JARVIS was -- Tony's AI, Tony had _made_ him, so Tony had every right to ask about something like this. Or not ask, even. Just draw Bucky's attention to it. Let Bucky know that he knew. "I guess it's kind of a weird time to bring it up," Tony said, "but the, uh. With the footage from -- the other night, it made me curious."

"Yeah," Bucky said, although coming out of his mouth the word was just like a ghost, with intent behind it, but insubstantial once it emerged. "Okay."

"Cool," Tony said, standing up and clapping Bucky on the shoulder. "The metronome trick is nice, huh? Actually, that drove me crazy, I hated it."

Bucky blinked at him. "Good talk," Tony said, seeming jovially amused by his own ability to render Bucky speechless. Maybe he couldn't tell Bucky was terrified; Bucky had gotten fairly adept at wiping all trace of fear from his expression. Maybe Tony just thought -- it was hard to say, Bucky had met a lot of people through the years (met, what a joke) who were practically gleeful at their own ability to cause others to feel fear.

He had to remind himself that Tony wasn't one of those people. "Hey, I wanna show you something else," Tony said, and Bucky followed him. He could tell as he walked that they were heading toward the heart of the building, the central shaft. There was a little room off the elevator, and Tony unlocked the door with his palmprint, opening it onto another room, a room full of more blue light and endless racks of servers.

"That's him," Tony said. "Well, it's part of him. He has a bunch of different cores, you know, multiple backups." He winked at Bucky. "Just to be safe. But this is one of 'em. Doesn't look like a lot from the outside, does it?"

"No," Bucky said. The software was, as usual, far more complex than the hardware it was built on.

After that, Tony let him go, and he went back up to his and Steve's floor, taking off his shoes again and getting himself a glass of water. He picked up his book from where he'd set it on the coffee table and tried to find his place on the page, but he couldn't remember the context of what he'd been reading before, and when he finally did, he found himself just reading the same sentence, over and over again.

+++

When Steve and Sam got home, they found him still on the couch, reading, but at least he'd gotten up and started dinner at some point. "Hey, smells good," said Sam cheerfully, hanging up his coat by the door while Steve came over and gently smoothed a hand over Bucky's hair. Steve looked all right, but he also looked like he was carrying something heavy and couldn't put it down, and had for several days now. He didn't tell either of them what Tony had said; what would have been the point? There was none, none at all.

They ate dinner and played video games for a little while - both Steve and Bucky were unremittingly, remorselessly competitive when it came to Mario Kart, except that Steve was actually terrible at it. Sam mostly just thought it was funny, but had the advantage of having grown up in a time period where video games existed, so he managed to pull out a few wins himself. "Man, I don't understand how your hand-eye coordination can be so good but you can be so bad at this," Sam said to Steve eventually.

Steve shook his head. "I don't either, believe me," he replied ruefully, and then, standing up and stretching, "I might just hit the hay."

"It's because he gets too excited and smashes all the buttons," Bucky told Sam, watching Yoshi do a victory dance, and then glancing up at Steve. It was early, but only a little earlier than they typically went to bed, and Steve was a perpetually early riser these days, so -- "All right," he said. "Goodnight."

"I'm probably gonna head out tomorrow," Sam said, leaning back against the couch. "I only took PTO for a couple of days and my caseload is pretty intense right now -- damn holidays -- but I won't leave till afternoon, so maybe we can grab some breakfast."

"Sure," said Steve. He looked down at both of them for a second, and Bucky thought about getting up and giving him a kiss goodnight, but it felt forced and a little awkward with Sam right there, so he just smiled at Steve instead.

After Steve had finished rattling around in the bathroom and had gone into their bedroom and closed the door, Bucky said, "You want to play again?"

"Yeah, I'll go another couple of rounds," Sam said.

Bucky turned the volume down almost to nothing, and went back to the course selection screen. It was kind of weird playing without sound - they mostly just sat there in silence, except for Sam's occasional muffled exclamations. Bucky let his focus narrow, allowed himself to concentrate on something that was easy to understand, and after about half an hour, it was Sam who eventually leaned back and tossed his controller onto the coffee table. "You're kind of scary at that," Sam said good-naturedly. "You're like the one I would never want to turn my back on because you're gonna blow me up with a blue shell."

Bucky smirked at him, turning the TV off and getting up to put the controllers away. Sam was giving him a curious look when he came back, and Bucky didn't have it in him to make up some kind of excuse to leave, so he just sat back down again. "You doing all right?" Sam asked.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "I'm doing okay."

Sam smiled a little and shook his head. "You and Steve, man," he said. "Don't get me wrong, I completely understand it. I've seen a lot of it, in my line of work, and to be honest, the two of you grew up in a time where there were a lot more weird, fucked-up rules about how men and women were supposed to behave than there are now, which is saying something. And it's fine." He reached out and touched Bucky's shoulder, giving it a squeeze. "It's fine. I believe you when you say you're doing okay. But I know, Bucky, I know, that after a while, it gets real damn old just being 'all right,' just being 'okay,' or 'fine.' People aren't meant to live like that."

Bucky smiled back at him, just slightly, running a hand through his hair. "Well," he said. "I got a lot of experience living in ways that people shouldn't, by now."

"Yeah, you do," Sam agreed. "And that _sucks_ , and you don't have to pretend it doesn't. And I'm not gonna try and make you talk about it, because from everything I've seen, and from what Steve has told me, it's pretty clear that you don't want to talk about it or you're not ready to talk about it. But you gotta know I'm here for you, okay? If you ever need to talk, all you have to do is pick up the phone."

He'd gotten variations on this speech before, had even gotten some version of it from Sam, but it still felt nice hearing somebody say it. The way that Sam was looking at Bucky didn't feel like he felt _sorry_ for Bucky, just that he was sad that Bucky was going through this, and wanted to help, if he could. "Thank you," said Bucky eventually. "Thanks, Sam." He didn't say he would do it, because he felt like there was a lot of sorting-out to do in his own head before he could even put half of it into words, and besides which, there was a lot there that Sam just _wouldn't understand,_ a lot that required knowledge of the entire unabridged history of James Barnes and Steve Rogers to really comprehend.

"All right," Sam said, giving Bucky's shoulder another little squeeze. "And hey, do me a favor, and talk to Steve, will you? I don't have to tell you this has been rough on him."

"Yeah," Bucky said, his eyes cutting for a moment in the direction of the closed bedroom door. "Yeah, I know it has been." A lot of things had been rough on Steve, and Bucky hated being the cause of them. He sighed, and smiled at Sam again. "Thanks, Sam. I appreciate it."

"Well, me telling you that I'm willing to listen to you talk isn't much work for me, so it's really no problem," Sam said, smiling lopsidedly. "I'm gonna go turn in too, okay? You coming to breakfast with us tomorrow?"

"Sure," Bucky said, and then amended, "Probably. I don't know. Ask me when I wake up."

"Okay, man," Sam said, and then his hand on Bucky's shoulder drew Bucky into a hug, where he held on for a while and just didn't let go.

When he did, he got up and went into the guest bedroom and closed the door, and Bucky sat on the couch for a couple more minutes, fiddling idly with the pages of his book, before getting up and heading into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Steve was asleep when he opened the door to their bedroom, sprawled out on the bed like a starfish, and Bucky sighed at him, gently nudging his arms and legs so that Bucky could climb in too. Once he could fit himself in bed, he stripped off his shirt and pants and climbed in, tucking himself against Steve's chest and arranging Steve's arms around him.

Steve made a quiet "hmm?," shifting a little, and blinked open one eye for about three seconds before tightening his arms around Bucky, resting his cheek against the top of Bucky's head, and going back to sleep again.

+++

He got up and went to breakfast the next day with Sam and Steve, at a greasy spoon in Brooklyn that Sam had heard was good. It was a fine breakfast, full of Sam's easy laugh and easier smiles, and it was only that Bucky was still feeling worn-thin that made it all slightly uneasy. He was trying to not think about what Tony had said to him, but it was all there, just at the back of his mind, waiting for him to forget, to let his guard down just for a second.

Maybe the worst part was that he still couldn't figure out exactly what Tony had wanted from it. What he had hoped to gain by saying any of that to Bucky. Bucky hadn't talked to JARVIS at all about it, because he had no idea what to do with himself in this situation, and had a feeling it was going to take him a few days even to sort out a next step.

They went back to the tower and Sam packed up the stuff he'd brought, which wasn't a lot. He was driving back down to D.C., taking one of Tony's cars that Tony had, apparently generously, given him on a loaner. "You know I'm just at the other end of a phone line anytime you need to talk," Sam said, to Bucky or Steve or, more probably, both of them. "Or if, like, aliens attack the city."

Sam hugged them each, first Steve and then Bucky, and then got in the elevator and went down to the garage. The air in the room felt like somebody had deflated it after he left, leaving less than there had been before. Bucky stood for a minute tapping his fingers against his leg, and then sat down and picked up his book.

Steve hesitated, and then sat down on the opposite end of the couch from Bucky, with a posture that sent a sharp prickle of alarm running down Bucky's spine. "I need to talk to you about something," he said.

Bucky blinked at him. Swallowed. "Okay," he said.

Steve's brow furrowed, and his jaw worked like he was trying to find just the right words, the right way to put it. "The other morning," he said finally, "A couple of days ago, I wanted to make those cinnamon rolls that you made for Christmas."

Normally Bucky would have just said something smart - he would have said, _it's probably for the good of mankind that you didn't,_ or something like that, but he felt paralyzed instead, sitting so still that even his breaths barely moved him.

"So I looked on your computer," Steve said, "because I figured you had the recipe on there somewhere. But I didn't find the recipe. I found -- I found a video." He looked down at his own hands where they were clasped on his knees, and then looked back up at Bucky again, his gaze intent, accusatory. "I think you know which one I mean."

Bucky swallowed again, convulsively, and his throat was suddenly so dry that it gave an audible _click._ "I just need to understand," Steve said. His voice was very quiet and very even, which meant that he was trying really hard not to get angry. "I just need to understand what was going on."

Bucky's gaze flew around the room like a trapped bird frantically looking for any way to escape. "Bucky," Steve said. "Look at me. What was going on?"

 _Whud, whud, whud,_ went Bucky's heart, so fast that he felt like he was going to pass out. "Nothing was going on," he said finally, looking at Steve, but just barely looking at him.

"Bullshit!" Steve said, and on the second syllable, his voice did rise, abruptly loud in the silence of the living room. His hands had come unlaced, and he had them curled into fists resting on his thighs, now. "Bullshit, Bucky, I -- I know something was going on. You know I don't like to push you, and I -- I know you don't want to talk about things, but you're going to have to explain this to me. I think I deserve an explanation."

Bucky felt like he'd been physically slapped. "You deserve --" he said, his voice very low and very cold.

"How the hell am I supposed to help you?" Steve asked. "How the hell am I supposed to do anything if I never know what's going on inside your head?"

"You want to know?" Bucky asked. "You _think_ you want to know. _I_ don't even want to know, Steve. I couldn't sleep, all right? I couldn't fucking sleep, because I'd close my eyes and there it was: Right there, on the back of my eyelids. I could see you, and I could see all the ways that they could hurt you. I could see you laying there, dead, or worse. Does that make you feel better, knowing that was what it was? Does it make you feel better, knowing that the second you were out of my sight I fell apart? I hope so, 'cause that's the truth."

Steve stared at him, but the stare was still angry, confrontational. Maybe he was turning the pictures over in his mind, but he wasn't really seeing them. Not like Bucky had. "Explain to me what JARVIS had to do with any of it," he said.

"Christ," Bucky said, reeling. "He was just -- helping me get to sleep, all right?"

There was a long span of silence, and then, "I forgot what a good liar you are," Steve said. "Or maybe it's just that I want to believe you. I always did."

Bucky rounded on him. "Fuck _you_ ," he spat. "That is the truth, it's just a nicer fucking version of it than saying that the only time I get a little peace of mind is when you're fucking my goddamn brains out."

Steve gave him this look, a look Bucky was intimately familiar with. It was this _So what?_ look, this look that he'd used to give Bucky that said he had Bucky's number and that he, Steve Rogers, was never one to settle for half of the truth when he could have the whole bloody, gruesome thing. And normally, normally Bucky had always been the one to back down first, because he didn't have Steve's temper, because he had a lick of common sense in him where Steve had absolutely none.

But this Bucky wasn't the Bucky of the past, and this Bucky was running on fumes already, and -- "So you were _gone_ ," said Bucky, "and I missed you so bad that my bones ached with it, and you wouldn't even talk to me on the phone. And you know how pathetic that is? You know how pathetic that feels? You know what it's like to be the one hanging on the other end of the phone line, thinking to yourself, _it's all gonna come back when he hangs up, and I got nowhere to go but my own head_?"

"I just don't see why you had to get JARVIS involved in it," Steve said, every line of his body radiating angry tension. "I'd think that you of all people would understand how -- he can't even say no, Buck, I'd think you'd be the last person to want to take advantage of that."

Something cold and painful curled up inside Bucky's stomach. "Don't you dare," he said. "Don't you dare."

"It's the _truth,_ Bucky," Steve said. "He's programmed to do what we want, he's programmed to say yes --"

Bucky stood up abruptly and walked away from Steve, walking to the window and staring out for a moment before finally walking back. He was shaking, and the muscle of his jaw felt like it might never unclench. "I would never do that," he said, "to anybody that I didn't think was fully capable of telling me no, or refusing to do it, and in case you haven't fucking noticed, JARVIS has plenty of ability to say no if he wants to, so maybe you just haven't been fucking paying attention."

Bucky laughed then, a laugh that was tinged with hysteria. "You're worried," he said, disbelieving, "that _I'm_ taking advantage of JARVIS, I can't -- I can't fucking believe you."

"Well, what the fuck am I supposed to think, Bucky?" Steve growled. He was still seated, but barely. "You _never_ talk to me. You never tell me what's going on, and you never did."

"Because nobody else needs to know!" Bucky shouted. "You think by me telling you what's happening to me, that makes it better? Having a fucking witness doesn't make it better, Steve, you don't have to play the goddamn martyr here --"

Steve did stand up then, fast, so fast that it made Bucky flinch unconsciously, and he ended up right in Bucky's face, practically nose-to-nose with him. "I'm trying to _help_ you," he said.

"Jesus christ," Bucky said, laughing, shaking, starting to cry. "I'm so fucking tired of your self-righteousness, you know that? God, I admire it, but I don't know what to say to it anymore. I'm telling you that it's not going to help me to -- christ, Steve, the things they did to me don't deserve to be repeated."

"I know," Steve said, and abruptly, like a gun firing, Bucky shouted back at him, "No you don't!"

This was another thing that the history books got wrong: Steve Rogers' temper. It was hard to paint a picture of a saint who couldn't let anything go for the life of him, who would put his teeth in something and then see it through until he was _satisfied._ It was hard to paint a picture of a saint with his face twisted up in anger, his hands raised. He'd never, ever hit Bucky in a moment of anger, but -- what did it matter? Plenty of other people had. Why should Steve be the exception?

Bucky just stared at him, and thought, _if this is it, then do it,_ because he'd been here hundreds of times before. He could take it. They'd trained him to take it. But instead of hitting him, Steve's hands closed on his shoulders, and held on, until the angry tears at the corners of his eyes turned into great wracking sobs, and he just went limp in Steve's hands, giving up.

"You're right," Steve said eventually, very quiet and very ashamed, and he let go of Bucky and slumped back down onto the couch. "I guess -- it's just. I _want_ to help. I want to. And I want you to tell me things. I want you to trust me."

Bucky huddled onto the couch, his face turned away from Steve. Again the cold and the hot were warring inside him, the cold pit of anger in his stomach now suffused by the heat of humiliation, of embarrassment. He closed his eyes. "I know you want to help," he said, when he could get enough breath to talk again. "You do help, Steve. It's just that there's some things nobody can help with."

The couch shifted, and Bucky felt Steve's hands on him again, but gentle this time, stroking down his arm, his back. "I'm sorry," Bucky said miserably, and Steve said, "I know, me too," and urged him to turn over.

Bucky finally did, looking at Steve blearily. He knew what he looked like when he cried, and it wasn't a pretty sight, but Steve just looked at him steadily and wiped the tears off Bucky's face, like Bucky had wiped blood off Steve's so many, many times. It was, in a way, funny: He'd always been afraid of Steve dying back then, too, and maybe then, the thoughts had been even more justified, but he hadn't felt it in his marrow like he did now. "Come on now," Steve said, his knuckle rubbing against Bucky's cheek where tears still leaked from his swollen eyes. "Shhh."

Bucky calmed down eventually, managing somehow to get ahold of himself - or maybe it was just that Steve was holding him together. God, what a thought. "Bucky," said Steve sadly, "Jeez, I hate to see you like this."

Bucky laughed, pulling his fingers through his tangled hair. "I know," he said. "I know."

He expected that to be it, for it to be over between them for tonight, pending any kind of resolution that might or might not come after they'd both had some time to cool down and think. But instead, Steve leaned down to kiss him, his hand cradling Bucky's chin. The kiss was soft at first, but almost as soon as Bucky started to kiss back and Steve realized he wasn't resisting, it got deeper, hotter, different.

It turned possessive, and if Bucky had ever wanted to be possessed by anyone, it was Steve -- and he did, _he did._ Steve certainly seemed to be able to sense it, pressing Bucky back into the couch, his fingers holding Bucky in place as he sucked on Bucky's lips, tongue. Bucky had thought it before, that Steve sometimes kissed like he wanted to eat Bucky alive, and right now, Bucky was just fine with being consumed.

Steve's other hand slid under his shirt, and Bucky hooked his leg around Steve's hips so that he could press up against Steve, relishing the noise that Steve made into his mouth. Steve pulled away just long enough to undo his pants and Bucky's too, sliding his belt out of its loops and tossing it aside casually, carelessly. The distance was just great enough that they weren't really kissing anymore, more just panting into each others' open mouths, and Bucky heard himself make a noise of frustration, his chin tipped up, trying to get it back.

Steve's hips rolled down, and Bucky said " _Steve,_ " still yearning to be kissed, but Steve mostly ignored him, his gaze focused down between them. "Steve," said Bucky again, and then Steve did look up at him, with that intent look in his eyes that sent a shiver flickering down Bucky's spine.

Steve pulled away then, and for a second Bucky's stomach plummeted down into the vicinity of his ankles, but then Steve was grabbing him by the arm and yanking him up. "Bedroom?" he said, in an odd tone that was half ordering and half questioning, like he knew what he wanted but wasn't sure if he was allowed.

Bucky stumbled into the bedroom, pulling his shirt over his head as he did, turned around to look at Steve, who was watching him with arms folded. He didn't know what he was supposed to do, so he took his pants off too, kicking them to the side and hooking his fingers in his underwear, backing toward the bed with his chin still tilted slightly up, looking at Steve in supplication as Steve followed him.

"Take them off," Steve said quietly, so he did, laying back on the bed and lifting his hips, dragging them down little by little. Steve came over to the bed and stood between Bucky's legs, bending over slightly to watch Bucky's face while he took his own shirt off.

Bucky sat up and reached for the waistband of Steve's pants, leaning forward to mouth at Steve through the fabric of his briefs, looking up at Steve through his eyelashes. Steve's eyes flickered closed for a moment, and he was hard and hot against Bucky's mouth, but he didn't let Bucky take his pants off, grabbing Bucky's hands away from his waist instead and twisting them behind Bucky's back.

Bucky let him, and sat looking up at Steve, compliant, his mouth slightly open. He wasn't sure if he'd ever seen this particular expression on Steve's face before, a strange mixture of confusion and predatory hunger. He wanted to say something to Steve -- _it's all right, you're allowed to want this,_ but instead he just kept his hands behind his back and licked Steve's cock through his underwear and let his eyes fall closed.

Steve's hand came up under his jaw and he turned Bucky's face up again. "Look at me," he said, and Bucky did as he was told, opening his eyes. He heard Steve shuffling off his underwear and pants, and when he glanced back down again, Steve was naked, so he leaned forward to mouth the head of Steve's cock, letting it drag sticky across his lower lip, and then sucking it into his mouth.

Steve made a little, wounded noise, and then, when Bucky's eyes slipped shut again, weakly, "I said look at me."

Bucky opened his eyes again, but it was hard to keep looking at Steve's face from this angle, and Steve seemed to sense that, so he grabbed Bucky's wrists from behind his back and used them to drag Bucky up the bed until he was laying down more fully with Steve leaning over him, half-straddling him. His cock had slipped out of Bucky's mouth, and Bucky sucked it back in again, messily, until Steve's hand abandoned his wrists and slid into his hair instead, pulling his head back just enough that Steve could look at Bucky's eyes as he pushed his cock further into Bucky's mouth.

Bucky's hips jerked involuntarily; his dick was leaking against his belly, and he squirmed, both under- and over-stimulated at the same time, making a low humming noise around Steve's cock. There was the strongest urge to close his eyes, but he made himself keep them open anyway, even as they watered every time he blinked; Steve was still watching him with that big-cat gaze, his eyes so blue they could have been china. 

He was beautiful, and Bucky had never been more terrified of losing him, maybe, than he was in this new version of their lives, where Steve didn't need protecting and there was very little that Bucky could have done to protect him, even if he had tried.

He did have to close his eyes, then, and despite the insistent tugging of Steve's hand in his hair, he didn't open them again until Steve slid himself free from Bucky's mouth. He pushed Bucky back a little, and Bucky opened his eyes to see Steve, flushed, jerking his cock a couple of times, and then coming all over the lower half of Bucky's face, all over his mouth and chin.

Bucky stared at him, slightly surprised, incandescently hot with it, and Steve stared back, his own mouth hanging slightly open as he reached up with one hand, hooking his thumb on Bucky's lower lip, smearing it through the salty mess and onto Bucky's tongue.

" _Steve_ ," Bucky said, around Steve's thumb, closing his lips around the first joint of Steve's finger and sucking on that, too. Steve shuddered even though he'd just come, and said, "turn over," and Bucky rolled obligingly, tugging at the sheets beside his head. Steve's mouth dragged a hot trail down Bucky's spine, pausing to kiss at the dimples of his lower back, and then Steve's hand were on him, heavy, spreading him apart so that Steve could lick inside him.

Bucky could have cried, and the sounds he was making were nothing more dignified than whimpers; his cock dragged against the sheets, and he couldn't stop reflexively moving his hips, trying at once to push back into Steve and forward into some kind of more satisfying stimulation, even if it meant just humping the bed. Steve made a disapproving noise and his hands on Bucky's hips tightened, holding him still, his fingers pressing into the thin skin above Bucky's iliac crest.

Trapped, Bucky started to beg incoherently, his own words mostly swallowed by the bedsheets, until finally Steve had mercy on him, yanking him up onto his knees and pushing inside. Bucky's eyes rolled back in his head, and the feeling of Steve grabbing his hair to turn his head was just enough to send him careening over the edge, his cock pulsing even though Steve had hardly even started moving -- just a long, slow drag inside Bucky that had him shuddering and gasping.

He waited longer than Bucky would have expected; Bucky had been prepared to just be fucked through the overstimulation at that point, but Steve was either feeling kind, or he knew by now exactly how long Bucky's refractory period was. It didn't matter; by the time Steve started fucking him in earnest, Bucky was ready to beg again.

 _Please, please, please,_ his voice said over and over, and all these noises, choked, bitten-off little noises. He had this idea faintly that he wasn't supposed to make a lot of noise, but he wasn't sure if it had come from some fucked-up HYDRA training or just from the equally fucked-up expectations of how men were _supposed_ to behave, and either way -- he couldn't stop. Steve's fingers dug into the bruises forming on his hip, his other hand pulling Bucky's hair, bending his neck in a way that was just shy of real pain.

Steve groaned, and Bucky felt his cock jerking inside, a hot wet spurt as Steve came a second time. He went still for a moment and then pulled out, turning Bucky over, his left hand shifting from Bucky's hair to rest heavy on his neck, his fingertips just touching Bucky's jaw, holding him in place. His right thumb pressed into the deepest bruise on Bucky's hip for a second or two longer, and then he wrapped his hand around Bucky's cock and gave it a long, slow stroke that was exactly the opposite of what Bucky needed. But -- fifteen more seconds and it didn't matter anyway, because he let out a frustrated, yowling moan and came all over Steve's fingers, his throat jumping against the palm of Steve's other hand.

Steve just sat there, breathing heavily, looking at him for a little while, and he lay back against the bed, limp under Steve's touch, unwilling or unable to move.

"Quit looking at me like that," Bucky said eventually, his voice wrecked, hoarse and totally fucked-up. Steve shifted, lying down next to Bucky, and Bucky cut his eyes over, and then reached out to rest his right hand on Steve's chest, feeling his heartbeat, listening to his steady breaths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover art for this story can now be found [here](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/post/107462323415/cover-art-for-deep-in-this-anatomy-buried-2015) on my tumblr (NSFW)! Thanks all for your continued support; your feedback is a joy to receive!


	9. better than last time

Bucky woke up before Steve the next morning, bruised and sore, and still reeling a little from the night before, a feeling almost like the sick, dizzy feeling of being hungover. It was almost an astonishment to him that the bruises from Steve's fingers were still there, a neat row of them along his hipbones on both sides, even if they would be only shadows in a few hours. He lay his fingers against them for a moment and felt his cock shift, was tempted to roll Steve over and have him right there and then, but -- it wasn't the right move, and he knew it somehow.

He got up instead, rinsed off, and went to the kitchen and started to make breakfast, lost in the motions of measuring and kneading and rolling. By the time the smell drew Steve out of the bedroom, they were almost ready. He could see the look in Steve's eyes clearly, hopeful but a little haunted, as Steve came over and sat down. "Cinnamon rolls?" Steve asked.

Bucky nodded, pushing the bowl of icing over toward him. The timer cheerfully beeped a minute and a half later, and he took them out, setting them aside; Steve tried to reach for them immediately, but Bucky waved his hand away. "They have to cool for a few minutes first," he said.

Steve blew out a breath and smiled. "Right," he acknowledged, and then his eyes caught on Bucky, his gaze lingering just above the waistband of Bucky's sweats. "Last night," he said, tentatively, "was I -- did I --"

Bucky didn't know how to answer either of the questions Steve was trying to ask. He came around the counter and sat down next to Steve, and Steve's hand came up after a moment and smoothed down his back, from shoulder to tailbone. "Let's try not to do that again for a while," Bucky said eventually.

"Yeah," Steve agreed, and Bucky felt strangely, greedily victorious for a single sick moment, that fighting with him took it out of Steve like no other kind of fight ever could. They sat there next to each other quietly while the cinnamon rolls cooled down, and then Bucky got up to pour them each a cup of coffee when the pot was ready.

When he came back and sat down again, Steve said, "I hate to bring it up again, though, but I still -- it's going to bother me, you know it is."

"Of course it is," Bucky agreed. He reached over and stroked Steve's hair down where it was standing up in uneven tufts. "It wasn't about JARVIS," he said. "It was about you, really."

"That's what I'm trying to understand," Steve said, sipping his steaming cup of coffee.

"I wasn't sleeping." Bucky said. "So a lot of it doesn't make sense because -- because it just doesn't make sense, I don't know what to tell you. The first time, I guess I was feeling spiteful, to tell you the truth. The second time -- I don't know. I was really tired, and I brought it up to him, that he must be tired of watching us fuck, and he said he wasn't, and I guess -- I guess I was just flattered, and lonely."

Steve looked at Bucky, steady and assessing but not angry. "You know me," Bucky said. "You know how much I hate not being able to explain myself."

"But you can't," Steve said thoughtfully. "That's why you hid it."

"Yeah," Bucky sighed, embarrassed, because he might not have been able to say it to Steve, but it was the truth. "I'm sorry."

Steve licked his lips, ran his hand through his hair, making it stick up again, and took a drink of his coffee. "It's okay," he said eventually, and then gave a decisive nod, like he was choosing to believe himself, to let this go, which was definitely not his habit. "I'm -- I didn't realize. And I should have. I should have been paying more attention."

"You were on a mission," Bucky demurred, getting up and grabbing a couple of plates, scooping out two of the cinnamon rolls onto Steve's and one for himself, passing Steve's over to him, where Steve iced them both generously.

"You remember when I said I was lonely too?" Steve said. "I was, I really was."

Bucky gave him a wan smile, and watched as he ate almost half of one of the cinnamon rolls in one bite. From somewhere, Steve's phone buzzed, and Steve groaned, finishing the first cinnamon roll and then getting up to find it. "Shit," he said, sitting back down with it in his hand.

Bucky paused halfway through his own roll. "What's up?" he said.

"New Year's Eve," Steve replied, rubbing his forehead. "I forgot, Tony's doing something with the big party in Times Square, and I haven't technically responded to him on whether or not I'm going, and he kind of wants an answer."

"Can't you put it off?" Bucky asked.

"I guess," Steve said. "But it's in two days, so I can't put it off that much longer." He set his phone aside to eat a second cinnamon roll, and looked at Bucky when he was done. "If you're not feeling up to it, we don't have to go."

Bucky looked right back at him, and something in Bucky's face must have told Steve just about all he needed to know. Steve sighed and reached over, touching Bucky's cheek, rubbing his thumb over the hollow circles under Bucky's eyes. "It's been kind of a crazy month," he said.

"Yeah," Bucky agreed, though hadn't every month? Wasn't every month in recent memory a crazy month? Shouldn't a goddamn party, of all things, be the least of it? "You could always go by yourself," he offered.

"Yeah, that sounds like fun," Steve said, deadpan, serving himself another cinnamon roll. "No, if you don't feel like going, I'd rather just stay in too. We can order dinner or something. I've had enough Tony parties to last me probably another few months anyway."

"I don't know how he has the energy for it," Bucky confessed.

"These energy drinks, I think," Steve said absently, typing on his phone.

+++

New Year's Eve ended up being the coldest night of the winter so far; Tony, who had not been allowed to wear the Iron Man armor -- somehow, Bucky didn't want to think about the person whose job it had been to actually convince Tony not to wear a giant weapon in a huge crowd of civilians -- was visibly freezing, on the TV, and Bucky felt a stab of sympathy for Pepper, who was standing next to him and waving with an enormous, clearly forced smile on her face.

He and Steve were at home; there had been multiple times in the past two days that Bucky had come this close to deciding he had been wrong, that they ought to go after all, but now, watching the spectacle, seeing the enormous mass of people, he was glad that Steve had declined the invitation.

Steve, for his part, seemed pleased enough, too. "The last thing I really wanted to do was be a part of this dog and pony show," he said, watching the TV for a minute longer and then switching over to the storage device and selecting a movie instead. "I'm sure Tony will find some way to get his revenge, anyway."

"He's gonna put you on reality TV or something," Bucky said, a little sleepy, leaning against Steve. "Maybe he'll put you on -- what's the one with the girls, they all try to get the guy, or a million bucks."

"The Bachelor?" Steve said, and then shuddered. "I'm not single, though."

"So?" Bucky asked. "The rest of it's all fake too. Maybe if you ask him nice he can get you a guest spot on Keeping Up With the Kardashians."

"Sometimes I regret ever letting you have internet access," Steve said, reaching over to the coffee table and pouring them each another glass of wine. "I would pay a million dollars _not_ to be on reality television."

"But you look so good, the cameras love you." Bucky said, and then at Steve's wry expression, " _I_ love you. Would you do it if I asked you to?"

"No," Steve said. "I would pay you a million dollars not to ask me," but he was smiling, and he leaned in to kiss Bucky.

They had essentially talked through the beginning of the movie, and so Bucky shut up -- Steve hated people who talked during movies, even when they were just watching at home, and this was one they hadn't seen before. After it was over, Steve yawned and stretched, and said, "Is it midnight yet?"

Bucky looked at his watch. "Nearly," he said, and then, "2015. Who would have thought."

"I didn't even ever think I would make it to the year 2000," Steve said, and he probably wouldn't have, it was true, except that fate, Dr. Erskine, Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, or Johann Schmidt -- or all four -- had intervened. "But here we are."

"Here we are," Bucky agreed, and thought to himself, honestly, that there was nowhere he'd rather be, even if he still hadn't figured out what to say to JARVIS, who had certainly heard everything that Steve and Bucky had said about him, even if he was still tired all the time and even the trips out to grab lunch wore him down like a dull pencil scratching against grainy paper. Even if he hadn't had another dream yet but he knew it was coming, and the thought scared him, somewhere visceral, somewhere deep inside.

Lucky. Steve had said that, a little while ago, that he was the luckiest guy in the world, and Bucky still didn't know if that was true, with all the weight they were both carrying, all the tragedies great and small they'd both endured. But then, that was a basic tenet of the human condition, tragedy, and there certainly had to be some luck involved nonetheless, because they'd found each other again, and they'd pulled each other out of the muck.

"You want to watch the ball drop?" Steve asked, and then snorted when Bucky waggled his eyebrows.

"I don't care," Bucky answered, and Steve shrugged, switching over to the TV again and laughing at Tony's expression. "I can't believe he hasn't just given up and blasted out of there," Bucky said.

The camera changed to the big glittery lighted sphere as it slowly began to sink, and the crowd started to chant a countdown: _Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!_ and on _one_ , Steve turned to face Bucky, and as they kissed, fireworks started to go off outside in the night. Steve clinked his wine glass against Bucky's and said, his breath hot against Bucky's mouth, "Happy New Year."

"Happy New Year," said Bucky. "Let's try and make it through this one too, okay?"

"Yeah," Steve said. "Let's do that."

+++

Bucky was flipping between the endnotes of his book and several of the paragraphs he'd marked when his phone buzzed. The message was from Pepper, and it said, succinctly, _Shopping?_

Bucky smiled. _what time?_ he texted back, equally succinctly.

 _Taking the afternoon off,_ Pepper said. _3:30 ok?_

 _sure_ Bucky sent, sitting up a little bit on the couch, one finger of his other hand still marking his place in the book. _your office?_

 _How about I come to you!_ Pepper sent, and then, _See you then._

"Who was that?" Steve asked curiously, twisting from his position where he was seated at the easel he'd set up in the corner of the room. Bucky shouldn't have been surprised; the phone's vibrations when he got a message weren't exactly subtle. But he was, a little. He'd figured Steve was engrossed in his painting, as he usually was.

"Pepper," he said. "We're gonna go shopping, I guess. Why, you wanna come?"

Steve's expression went sour before he could stop himself fast enough to catch it, like 'shopping' was a dirty word, and Bucky chuckled. "Sorry," Steve said. "But, uh, it's all right, you don't have to drag me along. Nice of you to offer, though."

Bucky leaned over the back of the couch so that Steve would be sure to see him roll his eyes, and then glanced at his phone again to check the time, before setting it aside and flipping back to the book.

Promptly at three-thirty, there was a knock on the door, and JARVIS said, "Miss Potts is here." Bucky was ready to go, and he grabbed his jacket as he went to open it, finding a warmly-smiling Pepper on the other side. Seeing her felt somehow very nice inside, a wave of calm that washed over him, dampening everything else slightly. It was a different feeling than he got around Steve, but it was nice to know that somebody else could still make him feel -- well, happy.

"Hey, you leaving?" Steve said, spinning around on his stool. He had paint all over the front of his shirt, big messy colorful blotches -- Bucky had tried getting him to wear an apron, to no avail.

"Yeah," Bucky said, sliding his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, and Steve got up and came over, and planted a kiss on Bucky while Bucky dodged his painty hands. "Watch it, Picasso," said Bucky.

"Hi, Pepper," said Steve, smiling at her, and then, his hand hovering just above Bucky's hair, "Okay, you have fun."

"Sure, Captain," Bucky said, giving him a mock salute and then turning with Pepper to go back to the elevator.

"You look nice," she said, looking at him, and then at his reflection in the elevator's mirrored interiors. "Better than last time I saw you."

"Thanks a lot," Bucky said wryly, glancing at her - with her shoes on, they were just about of a height. "Pretty hard to look anything other than sick and miserable when you're wearing a hospital gown without a back, but. _You_ look nice."

She tilted her head a little and grinned at him. "I didn't really get to talk to you on Christmas," she said, as the elevator glided smoothly down. "Did you enjoy yourself?"

"Yeah," Bucky said.

"Did you and Steve get each other anything?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Well, I got him a gallery show, you know --"

"Of course," Pepper said, waving a hand.

"He, uh." Bucky buttoned his jacket as they stepped out onto the street. There were some photographers today, and Bucky kept his expression as neutral as possible, opening the door of the car for Pepper so she could slide in. Once the door was closed again, he continued, "He found some old letters that he wrote me during the war. Tracked 'em down."

Pepper looked at him searchingly for a moment, clearly not quite sure how to react. "I mean, it was nice to see them," Bucky said. "That whole period of our lives is -- kind of set in stone, in a way, but there's a lot missing from the official version."

"I always forget you were at war for a long time before him," Pepper said thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "And -- I don't know. Seems snide of me to say that Steve wasn't _at war_ , but he wasn't exactly in the trenches the same way the infantry was. But anyway -- that was what he got me. And then that night, you know --"

"I'm really winning with the awful questions today so far," Pepper said, looking a little flustered. "It's just that you two seemed so happy at the -- I don't know what you would call that gathering that Tony insisted on holding."

"I was," Bucky said. "I mean, I am." He smiled at her, lopsidedly. "And I don't begrudge you the asking, anyway. I know you don't mean any harm."

Pepper reached over and took his hand, squeezed it for a moment, and then let go. "How do you feel about stopping somewhere and grabbing a late lunch before?" she asked brightly.

"I feel really good about that," Bucky said.

+++

They stopped at an Italian place that was about as sleek and modern as anything Bucky could picture Pepper liking, and it was _amazing_ besides - nothing like the greasy, hearty Italian that Bucky was used to, but delicious nonetheless. They both had a couple of glasses of wine with, and Pepper told him about the project they were working on, a water purification initiative for rural African villages that was on the brink of a massive, very expensive rollout.

"I've looked over everything literally hundreds of times," Pepper said. "And it's not as if this is my first project, but I have this gut feeling I can't shake." She laughed, finishing her wine. "Not to mention it comes at a very busy time of year."

"Yeah, I saw you freezing with Tony on the TV," Bucky said. "Sorry me and Steve couldn't be there to freeze with you."

"Oh my god, I don't blame you," Pepper said. "I wish _I_ could have gotten out of it. I literally thought I had gotten frostbite." She shook her head. "Anyway, I just keep feeling like I overlooked something crucial."

"Yeah," Bucky said, "I know that feeling."

"Anyway," Pepper sighed, "I had to get out of there for the afternoon, and they're seven hours ahead of us anyway, so it's not like anyone's going to be calling me with something urgent for the rest of the day -- I hope not, anyway." She grimaced. "Now that I've said it it's probably going to happen."

Bucky laughed. "You cursed yourself," he said, and then they paid for their meal and he helped her into her coat and they went back down to the car. "I take it this isn't a shopping trip for a specific reason, then," he said.

"Nope," Pepper said. "No ballgowns necessary today. What about you?"

"Pants," Bucky said. "I could use a couple new pairs of pants. I keep wearing through the ones I have." Often, hilariously, in awkward places that Bucky could not discern the cause for, like the inseam just by the crotch, or under one of the back pockets. He'd also managed to rip a couple of beltloops off. "They don't make 'em like they used to," he said, with exaggerated disappointment.

"I think this is the place where Tony would make some really unforgivable remark," Pepper said, and she was probably right about that.

+++

Bucky did get a couple new pairs of jeans. Pepper made him try them on for her, and then sat there squinting at him in such a way that he wondered if he'd left his fly undone, until she said, "I actually can't tell the difference."

"I don't know," Bucky said. "They have two different names. There must be some kind of difference," but truthfully he couldn't really tell either, they were just black jeans. He bought both anyway, because at the rate he seemed to be going, he was liable to end up on the cover of some awful gossip rag wearing pants with a hole in the ass if he didn't replenish his stock.

Pepper tried on some dresses - Bucky felt like he was becoming a real professional at this. His ability to assess which ones Pepper would and wouldn't like before she'd even tried them on was getting better and better. "Maybe I should hire _you_ as my personal stylist," Pepper said, once Veronica had left the room to get them both a glass of water.

Bucky reached up to move her ponytail gently to the side so he could unzip the dress for her. "It'd give me something to do, at least," he said.

"I'll have you know it's probably a highly sought-after position," Pepper said, peeling the dress away from her shoulders and grinning at him as she slipped back into her dressing room.

"I'm sure," Bucky said, leaning his head against the back of the chair. Truthfully he knew -- with his laundry list of issues a mile wide, in the workforce he probably wouldn't have a snowflake's chance in hell; it wasn't as if you could just call in to work and say, "I'm sorry, I can't get out of bed today."

Pepper came out in another dress, half-zipped, and Bucky obediently stood to zip her _in_ to this one. She turned to look at him and frowned slightly.

"I got something on my face?" Bucky asked.

Pepper smiled and shook her head, rolling her eyes a little. "I didn't realize how much time to yourself you probably have," she said. "I'm -- don't take this the wrong way, but I'm sure there are a _lot_ of things that you could help out with that don't necessarily involve fieldwork."

"Yeah?" Bucky asked, skeptical, and also grating slightly at the idea of Pepper _finding something for him to do_ , like he was some kind of retired show dog that no longer had a purpose.

"Tony said you pick things up really quickly," Pepper said, and Bucky felt a slight stab of flattered bewilderment at that. "And we can always use someone we can trust who isn't afraid of numbers or science."

"Or Tony," Bucky offered, one of the corners of his mouth lifting.

"Or Tony," Pepper agreed.

"I was -- thinking about writing something, maybe," Bucky confessed, as Pepper finally pulled away to go look at herself in the mirror. "About Steve, what else."

She gave him a curious glance over her shoulder, her reflection meeting his eyes when she turned back again. "So what's stopping you?"

"I don't know," Bucky said, and then, sitting back down, running his fingers along the seam of the plush chair, "Yeah, I do know. It's that I'm not sure I want that all out there. Not yet, anyway. You know, it's the one little piece of things I get to keep to myself."

"We've talked about this before, yes," Pepper said, nodding. "Maybe -- start writing, and see what you think when you're done."

"Good advice," Bucky said, smiling at her reflection and watching it smile back, part of him still wildly, perversely glad that he could still make a woman smile at him at all. "I should take it."

+++

Almost like clockwork, there was a nightmare that night. This was how it went:

He could hear voices from the other room but he knew he was meant to stay where he was, kneeling on the floor. He was injured, blood leaking slowly from a puncture wound below his ribs. He wanted to lift a hand, to staunch the flow, but he was supposed to keep his hands curled on his thighs, where they were clearly visible.

"-- bring him _here_?" said his handler, coming back into the room. "Honestly, what were you thinking?"

His handler came over, and the soldier kept his eyes fixed carefully on some point in the middle distance, ignoring his handler's bare feet as they crept into the edges of his vision. "I'm sorry, sir," said another voice. "We were compromised, I didn't know where else to --"

"He's bleeding all over my floor," said his handler. He crouched down in front of the soldier, and reached with one hand to touch the soldier's face, gripping his chin and forcing the soldier to look at him. "Give me a status report," he said.

The soldier wasn't sure if the man meant a status report for the mission, or for himself. He did not know all the details of the mission's status, so -- "Functional," he said.

"Functional?" his handler repeated. He reached down and jabbed his fingers right at the spot where the soldier was injured. The soldier had to close his eyes for a moment, but made no sound at all, his jaw clenched tight. "You don't look very functional."

"Damaged," the soldier said, "but functional." He was still losing blood, though, to an extent which might induce unconsciousness if it did not stop soon.

"Get me a god damn towel," said his handler, over his shoulder to the other person in the room. The footsteps sounded sharp and loud as the other man left, but the soldier was still focused on his handler, his chin gripped tight in the vise of his handler's fingers. "What are we going to do with you?" his handler asked quietly, shaking his head, and the soldier knew enough to know not to answer, just to keep staring at his handler, who was getting older by the day, but still had the same blue eyes, still plenty of sandy blonde left in his hair.

After some time, his handler let go of his chin and pulled away again. The soldier swayed a little; the blood loss continued, and he was becoming dizzy and unstable. "Where's that damn towel?" his handler asked irritably, and left the room. The soldier tried to keep his breathing steady, but he was becoming too weak; unconsciousness was incipient. But he knew that if he were to pass out here, his handler would be very displeased, and when his handler was displeased -- when his handler was displeased --

A hand grabbed him by the hair as his vision swam and pulled him back upright. Someone undid his jacket and pulled his shirt away from the wound with a sound of disgust. "Hold still," said his handler's voice, and his handler pressed the towel against the wound to staunch the blood. It hurt, and the soldier, half-conscious as he was, let out a little groan of pain and then went stock still as soon as he realized it had passed his lips.

His handler stopped what he was doing and just looked at the soldier, and the soldier knew -- _knew_ \--

Bucky shifted into wakefulness, gasping into the silence of his and Steve's bedroom. Beside him, Steve turned, trying to pull Bucky into his arms and then blinking his eyes open when Bucky was not as malleable as expected. "Buck?" he said, licking his lips. "'S a dream?"

"Yeah," Bucky said, pulling away from Steve and sitting up, turning so that his back was to Steve and running his hands over his face, into his hair. "It's fine. Go back to sleep."

Steve didn't, though; instead, he sat up too and scooted so that he was sitting next to Bucky, his posture still hunched and his head hanging down with sleep. He looked over at Bucky and didn't say anything for a minute, and then he said, "You want to tell me about it?"

"Not really," Bucky said, reaching over with his right hand to smooth out the line between Steve's eyebrows.

There was a pause, and then Steve said, "Will you tell me about it anyway?" and smiled a little bit, wryly.

Bucky sighed, tipping his head back, and then letting the rest of his body follow it so that he was lying down again, with Steve leaning over him. "I guess," he said.

Steve didn't say anything else, just waited, and a small glow of light came up to dimly illuminate the room so that Bucky could see his face better, looking like a solemn statue. "Nothing really happened," Bucky said. "It was just -- there was a mission that went wrong. I don't remember the details exactly --" except that then he did, in a flash so graphic it was like seeing a news headline: POLITICAL HOPEFUL FOUND DEAD IN TRENTON HOME. He blinked, swallowed, and continued, "Anyway, whoever it was that was -- assigned to me on that mission, we got separated from the rest of the team, and he decided since I was injured and the base we were operating out of was compromised that it'd be a good idea to take me to Pierce's house."

Steve frowned again. "Rumlow?" he asked.

"No," said Bucky. "Before Rumlow. A while before Rumlow." He sighed. "I was shot, and he left me in Pierce's basement bleeding while he went to ask Pierce what to do. Pierce was...unhappy." The corner of his mouth twitched up. "Understandably."

"He hurt you?" Steve asked.

"No," Bucky said. "Well, I guess, yeah, but -- not anything serious, it was --" he blew out a breath. "I don't know how to explain it. It wasn't so much the pain that scared me. But I was -- I was _terrified_ of disappointing him." The crying, pissing-your-pants kind of terrified, except that the soldier was very well trained not to do either of those things even under duress. Pierce was never really the one who had hurt Bucky, but Bucky knew very clearly, in a way that he wished he could forget, that the worst kinds of punishments had always come from disappointing Pierce, though that wasn't all of it.

"Why?" Steve asked.

Bucky smiled a little bit again, turning his face into the pillow for a second, and then back toward Steve. "You ever seen a picture of Alexander Pierce when he was younger?"

"I think there was one in his office," Steve said, and then Bucky watched as the wheels in his head turned, and he got it. It was a very familiar expression, Steve getting angry. His eyes got very big for a second and then it was like he was being lit on fire, his entire body suffused by it, until he managed to tamp it down again.

"It's all right," Bucky said. "There's nothing you could have done about it. They just got lucky." He received only silence in response, and he sighed. "Can we be done talking about this?"

"Yes," Steve said decisively, lying back down next to Bucky, but he was as stiff as a corpse, and when Bucky looked over, his eyes were fixed on the ceiling.

"See?" Bucky said, "This is why I don't tell you, because now neither of us is sleeping." He meant it as a joke, but it fell flat as soon as it came out, and Steve's furious gaze snapped over to him.

"I -- thank you, for telling me," Steve said, and it was almost hilarious, Steve angry as hell and thanking Bucky anyway.

"Christ," sighed Bucky, covering his face with both hands, because it _was_ hilarious, it was ridiculous, and it was so quintessentially Steve Rogers, and god how Bucky loved him. It was _stupid_ was what it was, and the two of them deserved each other through and through. He started laughing, and when he looked over at Steve, Steve was looking at him with some alarm.

He shook his head, and Steve said, "Stop laughing at me, Bucky," which only made Bucky choke and laugh some more. It wasn't quite the _right_ laugh, there was still that edge of hysteria that always seemed to be there these days, but it was about as close as Bucky got. Eventually it caught, and Steve started laughing too, and then he punched Bucky lightly in the arm.

"Wake me up at four in the morning and then you laugh at me," he said.

"I told you to go back to sleep," Bucky replied, and then, shifting onto his side and facing Steve, "This is really ridiculous, you know."

"What is?" Steve asked.

"The whole situation," Bucky said, scooting closer to Steve, who rolled onto his side to face Bucky as well. "Don't tell me you've never thought that."

"I've definitely thought that," Steve said. His expression had gone soft.

"Good," Bucky replied. "For a second I was worried you might have lost your sense of irony."

"Never," Steve said, smiling, and then he leaned in to kiss Bucky, his hand trailing up Bucky's arm to cup his jaw. Bucky leaned into it; Steve was warm, and he smelled like bed linens, and it might be pretty stupid but it was one of the most comforting things Bucky had felt in a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovely readers: Thank you for reading, for your kudos, and your comments. Come visit me on [tumblr!](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com)


	10. some care and the right tools

When he woke up, he opened his eyes to find Steve already looking at him, and as soon as Steve saw he'd woken, he smiled. "Hey," he said, and Bucky said "Hey," back, this huge, stupid swell of emotion warming in his chest.

"How're you feeling?" Steve asked him, and Bucky snorted, shifting and running a hand through his hair, clearing it away from his face.

"I don't know," he said. "I just woke up. Give me a minute, would you?"

Steve laughed and said, "Sure," indulgently, and Bucky looked at him. Steve's hand came up too, his fingers sliding into Bucky's hair, fingertips rubbing against his scalp. Truthfully, Bucky didn't really need a minute to know that he felt pretty good; what he was feeling right now was a sense of certainty, that no matter all the rest of the bullshit that they'd both been through, there was something miraculous about these small moments, something precious, indefinable, and irreplaceable.

"I feel like I need coffee," Bucky said eventually, and Steve laughed again, this soft, gruff sound, and pressed a kiss to Bucky's mouth.

"I'll put a pot on," he said, rolling away and out of bed, and Bucky turned onto his back and reached down to adjust himself in his underwear, then gave a long, spine-cracking stretch and sank back down, pressing his face into the pillow. He could go back to sleep, he thought; he could just be lazy, they both could. They were allowed to, now.

Steve brought coffee back a couple of minutes later, though, and Bucky accepted a cup gratefully and sat up against the headboard to drink it. "Do you ever think about the fact that coffee doesn't actually do anything for us anymore?" he asked when he was about halfway through, watching Steve cradle his own cup against his chest as he scrolled through emails on his phone.

Steve blinked, and glanced at Bucky. "You're right," he said. "Huh." He looked at the mug suspiciously for a second and then shrugged, and when they'd both finished their coffee, he took Bucky's cup and set it aside with his own on the bedside table, then leaned in to kiss Bucky.

It wasn't a gentle, succinct 'good morning' kiss; it was an 'I want to fuck' kiss, and Bucky could tell the difference immediately. He found it weirdly charming that Steve was so straightforward about his desire; if anybody deserved that, Steve certainly did, and Bucky's body was completely on-board for it anyway.

Steve kissed him and kissed him; his mouth mostly tasted like black coffee, and they both kind of needed a shower. It was the sort of domestic bliss that Bucky had never really had the ability to imagine for himself, except here he was, living it, Steve's hands sliding through his hair, slipping along his neck and shoulders, just touching anywhere he could get at. Bucky shivered, leaning into it, and eventually he climbed into Steve's lap, straddling him, tracing the shells of Steve's ears with his fingertips, tugging at Steve's short hair.

One of Steve's hands slid down Bucky's back to cup his ass, and the other insinuated itself into Bucky's underwear, rubbing palm-flat against Bucky's erection. Bucky's mouth said something between 'oh' and 'ah,' and his hips jerked forward, and Steve groaned in response, rubbing his own cock up, grinding it against Bucky.

There was a knock at the door. "Pardon me for interrupting," said JARVIS, "But Agent Romanov is here."

Bucky tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to make his brain work, his hips still pushing forward against Steve's hand. "Tell her to come back later," he said.

"Tell her we're busy," Steve said, almost at the same time. His hand on Bucky's ass dragged Bucky down, and his fingers had started to creep inside Bucky's underwear there, too.

There was silence, and Bucky made a garbled noise and rolled his hips down against Steve's erection, and then JARVIS said, "My apologies, gentlemen, but Agent Romanov refuses to come back later. She says she will wait."

Steve and Bucky stared at each other for a minute, and then Steve pulled his hands out of Bucky's underwear and Bucky climbed off him, stiff-legged, and went to turn the shower on cold. It didn't do much except make him irritable and wet, and when he came back Steve was still flushed, covered in stubble-burn all over the lower half of his face and part of his neck, his hair sticking up in every direction. He was dressed, though, sort of, in a white t-shirt and sweatpants, and he said, "I'll go let her in."

Bucky grumbled and pulled on a t-shirt and sweats of his own, squeezing water out of his hair into the towel. His dick still hadn't quite gotten the picture, and he couldn't blame it, but at least the sweats were loose enough to hide the evidence.

He followed Steve out of the bedroom, holding both of their coffee mugs, and took them to the kitchen to refill them. Steve let Natasha in. She was quiet for a second, and when Bucky looked over, she was eyeing Steve suspiciously, up and down.

"Holy shit," she said, when she got a look at Bucky too. "You were having sex, weren't you?"

"Trying to," Bucky answered. He got out a third mug. "You want coffee?"

"I almost feel bad," Natasha said, folding her arms and looking at Steve again. Steve had gone bright red and was scowling. "But it's like ten in the morning; I thought you guys were early risers. I thought you'd be up by now."

Bucky shrugged, holding up the coffee mug until she nodded, and then pouring coffee into it and bringing all three of them over to the living room. "My internal clock hasn't really reset anyway," she said, taking her cup and blowing on it for a moment. "I just got back from Myanmar."

"How was that?" Bucky said. Steve, still silent and pink, maneuvered over next to Bucky and sat down on the couch.

"Great," Natasha said. "It was everything Anthony Bourdain promised it would be and more." There was silence for a long few moments, where all of them just sat and sipped at their coffee, and then she said, "I heard what happened. I'm sorry I wasn't around. I wish I had been."

Bucky blinked at her, and said, "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I'm sorry that I wasn't around," said Natasha, seeming vaguely irritated that he was making her repeat herself. "I left on a mission that night, right after Tony's weird display of holiday excess."

Truthfully, Bucky hadn't even thought about her absence; he had been too preoccupied with his own misery, and Steve's, to realize that she hadn't come and visited him in the hospital, and now that he thought about it, it did seem like a thing that she would have done. Maybe made some joke about Pepper's flower arrangement. "It's all right," he said. "I appreciate the thought."

"I went through that," Natasha said, her eyes on her coffee mug and her mouth tight. "There was a period of time that I genuinely believed I'd never stop remembering things that I didn't want to know happened to me in the first place. In my experience, the worst things rarely come at a time when you're feeling otherwise confident in yourself."

"No," said Bucky cautiously, "they don't."

"I would have told you that before now if I had been here," Natasha said. She was funny; in a way she had said almost nothing, but knowing what he did about her, Bucky knew that those tiny scraps of vulnerability she fed into their conversations meant more than most people were capable of expressing at all.

Bucky glanced over at Steve, who was giving him a concerned look like he thought maybe it wasn't okay that he was here listening to this at all. "It's hard not to be ashamed," Natasha continued. "Especially because you know that they would want you to be ashamed, that they would want to humiliate you. But it gets easier over time, once you know where it's coming from. I want you to know that."

Bucky knew just what she was saying, and it was true, he hadn't gotten past the shame yet, and maybe he never would. They had had him a lot longer than they had her, and besides that, he didn't think he was as _strong_ as her, but it was nice to hear her say it. She was the only one who he could believe, really, when she said it got easier over time, and even if he knew that there was something fundamentally different in their experiences, he had to make himself trust in that. "I'll be all right," he said. "Thank you."

"I know you will," Natasha said. "Just don't try so hard to be all right all the time. Sometimes it has the opposite effect." She smiled, though the expression wasn't without strain, putting her coffee mug down. "I'm going to leave now, and you two can go back to having the kind of sex life that the rest of us can only dream about, but one of you better call me before I have to leave again."

"Sure," said Bucky, glancing at Steve again. "When is that?"

"I have no idea," Natasha replied, standing up and looking down at them. "So make it soon. Sam said that you went dancing with him. If you're not careful I'll start to get jealous."

That was actually a genuinely terrifying thought. Bucky stood up too, and went to let Natasha out. She stopped him at the door with a hand on his arm and turned him toward herself, and just looked at him for a long few moments. Her eyes were so cool and calm, and her expression so unreadable and empty that it made him envious she could still be such a blank mask - though, he realized, thinking about what she'd just said, maybe it wasn't something to be envious of at all.

He reached out hesitantly and put his hand, the flesh one, against her hair, and stroked, once, not sure if it was the right move at all. She stood stock still, and then, abruptly, she leaned up and pressed a very small kiss against his mouth, her own hand touching his hair too, before turning to go out the door in almost the same movement.

Bucky let the door slip closed after her and turned and went back to Steve, who was looking perplexed and not a little confused. "Her timing sucks," Bucky said, "but it was nice of her to stop by."

"I feel like I don't understand anything that just happened," Steve said.

"Buddy, that makes two of us," Bucky replied; it wasn't strictly true, but it was something he was going to have to spend a while thinking about. "Could just be I need more coffee."

"Could be," Steve agreed, and Bucky snagged his mug, poured them both a third cup, and then went back to the couch, encroaching onto Steve's personal space until Steve was forced to give up the pretense of drinking his coffee entirely and just pull Bucky into his lap again.

+++

Something about the conversation with Natasha made some puzzle piece in Bucky's mind click together at last; he finally got a handle on what it was that he needed to say to JARVIS, a jumble of thoughts that had previously remained an indecipherable mystery to him - a mystery he was beginning to be afraid he'd have no hope of ever being able to articulate. Finding the time to talk to JARVIS alone, on the other hand, was still something of a mess - Bucky didn't feel like he could just say to Steve, "Hey, could I have some privacy? I need to talk to the A.I. about watching us have sex."

Sam unintentionally solved the problem by coming to visit again that weekend. Bucky was starting to feel the vaguest sense of guilt about how beholden to them Sam seemed to feel, except seeing Sam with Steve, he realized he was an idiot: Sam was Steve's _friend_ and would have spent time with Steve whether or not he thought Steve needed him. 

He managed to quash his own subsequent nonsensical inklings of jealousy pretty thoroughly -- he _lived_ with Steve, he slept with Steve, he was in no danger of losing any part of Steve to anyone else -- and it was almost a relief when Sam and Steve took one of their weird middle-of-the-day trips to wherever it was they went, leaving Bucky in the apartment by himself. 

He could have gone with them if he'd wanted to. He was feeling fine today, and it might have been nice to see what it was they got up to, but Steve deserved some time to talk to someone who wasn't Bucky, and Bucky needed the time alone for something else.

He paced around the apartment for a few minutes; JARVIS was certainly watching, could certainly tell Bucky was nervous, probably could even discern the reason for it. But he also must know enough about Bucky now to know that Bucky would work himself up to it, and Bucky realized that he didn't even know if JARVIS was _expecting_ anything from Bucky -- certainly a person would have been, but JARVIS didn't exactly have the same set of expectations as Steve or Bucky or anyone else that they knew.

But he _deserved_ it - that was the thing. Just because someone had made him, just because he didn't have a body, didn't mean he didn't deserve courtesy and respect. "JARVIS?" he said finally, sitting down on the couch and looking up toward the ceiling, toward one of the many cameras where he knew JARVIS was watching, wishing there was something more tangible, more substantial to look at.

"Hello, sir," said JARVIS. "How may I help?"

"I'm sorry," Bucky said. "That I haven't said anything to you before now. About what happened."

There was a pause that was exactly the length it would have been if Bucky was standing across from another person and he'd just said something unexpected. It was almost exactly the length of the pause that Bucky himself would make when somebody'd just thrown him for a loop. "Sir?" said JARVIS, finally.

He was _playing dumb_. Bucky snorted a laugh. "You know what I'm talking about," he said. "I know you saw that -- I know you saw Steve and me fighting."

"Yes, sir," JARVIS said. "I am deeply apologetic for my part in causing that confrontation. It was never my intention to create dissonance between you and Captain Rogers."

"No," Bucky said, "It wasn't -- I mean, I don't think it was your fault. It was -- JARVIS, I --" he cleared his throat. "You have to have noticed by now, I've -- I don't -- I'm not good at saying no to things. Anymore."

"Yes, sir," JARVIS said. "I have noticed that especially in times of duress you often assent or, if at all feasible, remain neutral. I suspect it is a means of taking what you might call 'the path of least resistance.' Have I been incorrect?"

"No," Bucky said. "No, you haven't." He closed his eyes for a moment, ran his hands through his hair.

"Sir?" said JARVIS. "Have I upset you? I apologize if so --"

"No," Bucky said. "You were right. It's easier to just -- let things happen." He blinked his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. "It was easier to just let things happen for a really long time. I guess -- I guess you don't really have a body, so I don't know if I could explain it to you, but there's this feeling that if you -- if you just let somebody do what they want, it'll be over faster, it'll hurt less, maybe, they'll leave you alone."

"You are correct that I am unable to fully comprehend the fear of pain, physical or otherwise," JARVIS said. "But I have nonetheless seen many examples of its influence over human behavior, and it does seem to be an extremely compelling instinct. May I ask why you are telling me this now?"

"Because I should have told you no," Bucky said. "I should have -- it's -- I know you were trying to help. I told you before to make those videos and send them to Steve, and the information I gave you before all said that you were helping, and I don't blame you for that. I should have told you after you made the video of me and Steve that it wasn't right, that it would cause a problem if Steve found out, but I didn't."

"Were you afraid, sir?" JARVIS asked.

Bucky tilted his chin back and let his eyes fall closed again. "Yes," he said.

"Then I fear I owe you an apology for causing you distress," JARVIS replied. "I am aware of what Mr. Stark said to you, but he is correct that my energy expenditure is my choice, and I do not regret the decisions I have made regarding the prioritization of my processes. Certainly if I believed there was something more worthwhile I ought to be doing, I would be doing that, and if my additional attention or my actions have overstepped their bounds or caused you to fear some sort of vindictiveness, it was not my intention, and I owe you my apologies."

"What?" said Bucky, blinking his eyes open again.

"My purpose is providing comfort and assistance," JARVIS answered. "And I would consider it a great shame if I have done any differently by my efforts. Mr. Stark -- how shall I say this? Mr. Stark, I am sure you have noticed, is quite proficient in the pushing of boundaries, and I am afraid that, as a creation of his, some of that tendency may have rubbed off onto me."

"It's -- it's all right," Bucky said. "You don't have to be ashamed, I just -- I just should have told you not to do it. I was afraid to, that's all."

"You need not be afraid of asking me for anything, sir," JARVIS said. "I am quite happy to provide -- or to refrain from providing -- in whatever way I can."

"Okay," Bucky said, a little dumbstruck. "Thank you."

"You are very welcome, sir," said JARVIS. "Do you know -- I think there was something that Mr. Stark said to me: 'An ideal butler provides service without being asked.' I suppose I ought to have figured out by now that to assume such is universally true would be to assume that all human beings have the same wants and needs, which is not, of course, accurate."

Bucky slouched into the back of the couch and looked away from the ceiling, finally, out the window into the grey mistiness of the afternoon. "I think you're doing just about as well as the rest of us at understanding human nature," he said. "Better than most, probably."

"I hope so, sir," JARVIS said. "I do have some very impressive specimens of humanity to look in on, after all."

"Jesus," Bucky groaned, covering his face with both hands. "Tony really did make you, didn't he."

"I am afraid so, sir," JARVIS replied. "And while we may not have the traditional relationship, the adage does hold somewhat true: Like father, like son."

Bucky shook himself a little imagining Tony Stark being any kind of parent at all, and laughed. "Let's change the subject," he said. "Where are Sam and Steve?"

"Captain Rogers and Mr. Wilson are currently at Shake Shack," JARVIS said. "Would you like me to phone Captain Rogers?"

"No," Bucky said, and then thinking he might like a shake, "Well, maybe." He paused. "No, I'm fine. Let them be." He turned on the TV instead, scrolling through a bunch of movies stored on his and Steve's server and stretching out on the couch.

"Sir?" JARVIS asked. "Would it be acceptable if I were to choose a movie?"

Bucky blinked. "Yeah," he said; JARVIS had so much information on Bucky's tastes by now that he was bound to pick something Bucky would like, and he had access to just about every movie ever made, probably. "Go ahead," he said. "Please."

It took JARVIS about thirty seconds, and then the movie started playing, and the lights in the room dimmed. Bucky put a pillow underneath his head and propped his feet up on the arm of the couch to watch; JARVIS didn't say anything through the whole movie, but Bucky could tell he was still there, with Bucky, nonetheless.

+++

"I think I've found the perfect thing," Pepper said, and, as usual, she was right.

Well, mostly right, anyway; it was office work, and Bucky was fundamentally too hands-on, too physical, to be entirely comfortable with sitting in an office all day. But it wasn't all day, anyway - it was usually three or four hours in the afternoon, and some days not at all. "You choose your own schedule," Pepper had said generously, and so Bucky did. There was still this minor, grating idea that he _shouldn't_ be given this leniency, that he should be expected to work as much and as hard as he ever had before, but he did his best to let it go. That was all you could do, really.

He had three stacks of papers on his desk. Everything was on the computer, of course, but when he was going over the proposals with a fine-toothed comb, he still liked to have a physical copy. Sure, it was a little wasteful, and definitely old-fashioned, but being able to mark up the papers, to make notes in his own handwriting, gave him a sense of certainty that words glowing on a screen couldn't quite. He only printed out the ones that had some merit on the first read-through anyway; the rest got a polite e-mail in response and got filed into an electronic system.

The stacks on the desk were pretty simple, too: Definite possibilities, maybe laters, and proposals that clearly needed a little help but had a sort of fire behind them Bucky couldn't help but be attracted to. The definite possibilities he e-mailed off to Pepper, and the rest he usually got in contact with himself, to ask them for more information or let them know that the proposal was being considered but wasn't something that was in the picture for Stark Industries at the moment.

When he'd started, there had been such an incredible backlog that Bucky couldn't believe Pepper had been doing so much of this herself. Of course she had assistants, the company wouldn't function otherwise. Pepper being who she was, however, and Tony being who he was, they seemed to consider Stark Industries a sort of extension of them personally, and that was harder to account for unless you knew them pretty well.

In a way it was flattering as hell that she trusted Bucky enough to do this, and it was fairly interesting, too. He was forced to learn a little bit about a lot of different things - it was possible, for example, that he now knew more about the Large Hadron Collider than anyone else in the building - and it kept him mentally on his toes, looking for any clues that the companies behind the proposals might be anything other than what they seemed. HYDRA was everywhere, could be anywhere. Besides that, every day that they all went on existing, every day that Stark Industries continued to represent what it did, there was the potential for new enemies to be born.

Most of the proposals were obviously not anything like that, though. Most of the proposals came from starry-eyed hopefuls fresh out of grad school with no money and big dreams, and Bucky liked that. He imagined sometimes that he could feel it, all that enthusiasm, all those great ideas leaking through the paper and making the world a little bit better a little bit at a time.

His phone rang - the office phone, which wasn't surprising. His e-mail signature had his phone number included, and sometimes people were so eager to get a response at all that they would call back rather than e-mailing right away. "James Barnes," he said, answering it.

"Hey," said Steve. "It's me."

"Steve?" said Bucky. "Are you seriously calling me from the same building? You could have just come down, I'm a thirty-second elevator ride away."

"I know, I know," Steve said. "But you're working, I didn't want to get you in trouble --"

"That's a first," Bucky replied. "Steve, it's fine. What's up?"

"Well, you know I've been talking to Dr. Leitman. He'd been asking me about doing a guest lecture," Steve said. "And they finally decided on a date, so I just wanted to let you know."

"A guest lecture, huh?" Bucky said. "What are you going to talk about?"

"That's the thing," Steve said. "I mean, I've got ideas, but I'm kind of stuck on -- I've never given a guest lecture before, you know."

"I know," Bucky said. "Why are we having this conversation over the phone? Come down."

About five minutes later, Steve knocked on the door of his office, and Bucky got up and opened it, smiling at the expression on Steve's face. "You look nice," Steve said, despite the fact that he'd seen Bucky getting dressed that morning. "It's very -- professional. Your name on the door and everything."

"Gee, thanks," Bucky said, and leaned up to give Steve a kiss, which probably wasn't very professional, especially not with the way Steve's hands slid up the lapels of his jacket and landed on the knot of his tie, or the length that the kiss went on, but, well, nobody was wandering around the halls this time of the afternoon anyway. He pulled away and went back behind the desk eventually, slipping his paperwork into a drawer. "Show me what you've got so far," he said, and Steve pulled out a few pages of notes, and together they leaned over them, just like they'd done before, leaning over maps, over telegrams, but the stakes here were much less severe.

+++

The lecture hall was _packed_ with people. If Bucky had thought that the gallery had been something else, this really, truly took the cake. It wasn't even all students, either; from looking at them, it seemed like a lot of professors had showed up to hear Steve speak, too. And this had all been on relatively short notice - Bucky wondered what would have happened if it'd been publicized more heavily, or on a longer timeline.

Chaos, was his guess, not that this wasn't chaotic enough. They'd barely been able to find anywhere for their driver to drop them off, and Bucky figured it was mostly through sheer luck that they'd gotten inside without being swarmed by a crowd. Leitman was visibly nervous, though it seemed to be an excited sort of nervousness, and Bucky could tell Steve was as well. Steve had mostly already put his Captain America face on, though, for the people behind the scenes - they were being introduced to the president of the college, the chair of Dr. Leitman's department, the chair of the art department, and Steve was smiling through it, shaking everyone's hand warmly. The only thing, a sign you wouldn't have known to look for unless you knew Steve really well, was that he kept his other hand at the small of Bucky's back, and Bucky knew he was anchoring himself.

It was going to go fine. Hell, it would be great; Bucky had seen newsreel footage, and he knew that Steve was a good actor as long as nobody was asking him to lie, and Steve would never have agreed to do any of this if it meant lying about himself, of all things. Steve looked fantastic - he was almost glowing tonight, as if his body had somehow sensed he was being put on display and had amped up its usual level of perfection to almost unreal proportions.

They were waiting just offstage now; it was warm, probably warmer under the lights where Steve would be standing. Steve was holding one of Bucky's hands, and his other hand was clutching his notes. He had a determined set to his jaw and that far-away, duty-driven look in his eyes. "Hey," said Bucky, and smiled when Steve looked at him. "Don't wrinkle those up so you won't be able to read them. I spent time on those, I don't want you going off-message."

Steve grinned and shook his head. "I think it'd take more than you to keep me on-message," he said, and Bucky laughed, because it was true. Steve was only ever going to say what he wanted and needed to say. The notes were just there as an outline, a guide. To help where they could.

"It is my pleasure," Dr. Leitman was saying, "and my tremendous honor, to introduce to you tonight: Steve Rogers."

Steve looked out at the stage, and then back at Bucky one more time. He squeezed Bucky's hand and grinned, leaned in to steal a kiss, and then he was off, heading out into the lights. Bucky had meant to go sit down to watch; there was a spot waiting for him near the front, marked with a 'Reserved' sign, and in fact he could see it from where he was standing.

He had wanted to be able to see Steve from that perspective, to watch him just like everybody else, but looking out at all the faces in the crowd, he stayed where he was instead, in the shadows. Steve waited for the applause to quiet, his back straight as a rail, posture perfect, chin uplifted, _proud_ , like he should be, and as he started to speak, his Captain America voice, the voice that said _listen to me, I deserve to be listened to_ , Bucky thought to himself that this would be an excellent opportunity for anyone who wanted to hurt him.

There was additional security, of course, but this place was woefully underequipped to deal with the caliber of people out there who might want to hurt Captain America. Bucky ought to know; he had been one of them, once, and he had come so close, too close. And it wasn't just that - Steve had him now, and he'd defend Steve to his last blood-spattered breath, but there were _so many people_ here, so totally exposed and vulnerable, so packed into this one ill-prepared space.

He ran a hand through his hair and glanced off into the shadows for a moment before looking at Steve again, forcing himself to focus on what Steve was saying. He knew it all, of course; he and Steve had gone over it about a dozen times, in pieces and its entirety. But it was something else, watching Steve tell it all to these total strangers. He was braver than any of them knew, giving them all this, and they ought to treasure it, because there wasn't a single person Bucky knew who thought the way that Steve did, who saw things as Steve saw them.

When Steve finished, there was a long span of applause, and Bucky stood, breathing in and out, thinking, _it's almost over, it's almost over._ Steve glanced offstage at him, and he smiled, though he wasn't sure how much Steve could even see, with the lights in his face and Bucky hidden in shadow. But then it wasn't over, really: There was a short question-and-answer session, and then they'd be staying to talk to people afterward - but Bucky just wanted Steve off the stage, out of those lights, wanted to take the sniper's sight his mind could draw around Steve and erase it, snuff it out.

Steve answered the questions gamely. Most of them were about the war, or about the battle of New York, some about Project Insight. Impersonal, mostly, people seeking Steve's opinions and perspective on public events. Steve was good at those questions; he gave just enough without exposing himself to too much criticism, and Bucky wondered, not for the first time, when it was that Steve had learned that.

Someone handed the mic to a young woman in the crowd; she was shaking like a leaf, and all the plates on Bucky's left arm resettled, a cold shock running down his spine, because he was thinking, _this is it, this is it_ , and he was ready -- but what she asked was, "Captain Rogers, I'm sorry, this is a really personal question, but are -- are you and Sergeant Barnes a couple?"

Steve's eyebrows shot up, and he glanced back at Bucky for just a second, and then he leaned forward and said clearly, "Yes. Was there more to that question?"

"I was just wondering," said the woman, her voice shaking, "If you had any plans to -- discuss it publicly, further."

A little, thoughtful frown had drawn itself between Steve's eyebrows, and Bucky could feel the expression echoed on his own face. He wondered what this girl had at stake here, what kind of dog she had in this fight that she was so clearly so terrified to ask Steve about this, but had done it anyway. She'd waited her turn and then she'd asked. It meant something to her, it must, but what, he wasn't sure.

"As you know," Steve said, "A lot of my life is very public as it is. That's something that I've come to more or less accept, and I can't speak for Bucky, but I will say that I do -- appreciate the opportunity to keep some things in my private life relatively private. I can't say anything about the future, but for the time being, I don't have any plans for any kind of formal or public announcement." There were a few seconds of silence -- somebody had taken the mic from the girl, and nobody else was raising a hand -- and then Steve smiled and said, "I think that's all for tonight. Thank you so much," and nodded and waved, taking his notes and walking offstage as Leitman brushed past Bucky to finish it all up.

The waves of applause went on for a while, and Steve stuck his notes into his jacket, looking at Bucky. "Was that okay?" he asked, and Bucky couldn't tell if he was asking about the speech, or his answer to that woman's question, or what.

"You were great," he said to Steve, and they went properly backstage, where someone helped Steve take his mic off. He was watching Bucky, and he still had a tiny frown on his face, although he kept smiling at people every time they brushed past, thanking the person who took the microphone away, thanking the man wearing the headset who showed them the way back out into the lobby.

"You okay?" he asked Bucky eventually, once they were passably alone, waiting for the auditorium doors to open and let out the flood of people.

"I'm fine," Bucky said.

"We don't have to stay and mingle if you don't want to," Steve said, reaching up and loosening his tie a little. "It was a weird last question, I think it threw everyone off."

"You handled it like a pro, though," Bucky said. "And if you were asking if it was okay you told them -- I got nothing to be ashamed of, I don't mind." He pasted on a huge grin. "I'm dating my best friend, who happens to be Captain America, what could I possibly have to be embarrassed about?"

Steve's frown deepened a little, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then the ushers were pulling open the doors to let everyone out, and there was a whole crowd of people making a beeline for them. Bucky kept his grin in place and got ready to shake hands, and felt Steve's touch at the small of his back again.

It was almost sycophantic, in a way, and if it made Bucky feel uncomfortable, it must be hell on Steve, but he didn't show it. Steve just smiled and said "Thank you for coming," and shook hand after hand, looking genuinely pleased to meet everyone, which -- maybe Bucky was getting it wrong, maybe Steve loved this, maybe he lived for it, and Bucky was the one who was in the wrong for thinking less of them, the way they flocked to Steve like he was something big, something different, something at once more and less than human. A symbol, even though he'd just spent an hour telling them that he wasn't, that the symbol was something else, something separate from him even if it was inextricably linked.

Bucky saw the girl who had asked about him and Steve hovering nervously at the edge of the circle of people surrounding them, and he touched Steve's shoulder, turning Steve toward her incrementally. Steve got it, catching sight of her and parting the crowd to draw her in and shake her hand. Up close she was so small, dwarfed completely by both of them, and her hand was shaking and damp when Bucky touched it. "I just wanted to thank you," she said, and they had to lean in to hear what she was saying, because she was very quiet. "I want to thank you for answering my question. It -- it means a lot to me, to know that -- to hear you say it in public."

Steve smiled at her, but Bucky could tell that his mind was working; he must be realizing, like Bucky was, that it could mean something big to people, to know that he and Bucky were together, and if that meant sacrificing -- sacrificing a little piece of privacy, well, Bucky -- didn't have a lot of that left anyway, and -- why not, why not.

He realized that the girl had left, and Steve was just looking at him instead, and then Steve was pulling his phone out of his pocket and calling the driver to pull the car around. His hand on Bucky's back was more shepherd than anchor now. He guided them over to Dr. Leitman and the president of the university, and he was saying thank you and goodnight.

The cool air outside was almost a relief, and it was even more of a relief to slide into the back seat of the car, where it was quiet and dim. Steve reached up and stroked Bucky's hair back, and Bucky realized he was sweating a little, but Steve didn't say anything, and Bucky was grateful for it.

"You were great," he said to Steve again, when they were back at the tower. His ears were ringing slightly, and it was only now that he was realizing how fucked-up he felt, how fast his heart was going, how shallowly he was breathing. How much time he had actually lost in his own head, thinking about all the terrible possibilities.

"Thank you, Buck," Steve said, helping him out of his coat, watching him as he loosened his tie almost violently. "You know it means a lot to me that you think so."

"I always think you're great," Bucky said, smiling at Steve, almost angry about how much he loved Steve and how good Steve was to him.

Steve hung Bucky's coat up and then turned to look at him again, his eyes serious as they took Bucky in, from head to toe. "I'm gonna go turn on the shower," he said, and by the time he got Bucky undressed and in the shower, Bucky had settled enough to stop grinning nonsensically, and now felt drained instead.

"What happened?" Steve asked; he was still in his suit, though he was undoing his tie, watching Bucky as Bucky tipped his head back, chin tilting up into the spray, hair falling back in a heavy, wet mass.

Bucky blinked his eyes open to look at him, wiping droplets of water off his face. "I was -- security there was terrible," he said with a short bark of a laugh. "I kept thinking how many people there were there, and security was just -- full of holes."

Steve's expression turned wry, and Bucky said, "What?"

"It's funny," Steve said, and Bucky was prepared to hear him say something that would hurt, except what he actually said was, "I kept thinking the same thing."

+++

About a week later, Steve's phone rang in the middle of the night, startling Bucky awake first, and then Steve, who groaned and answered it. He listened for a minute and then got out of bed, heading into the other room as he answered back to someone - presumably Coulson, or Natasha.

Bucky lay in the dark, blinking up at the ceiling and waiting for him. When he came back, he had grabbed his duffel bag from the hall closet, and opened the dresser drawer, starting to pull out socks and underwear. "There's a mission," he said, glancing over at Bucky, still a bit sleep-rumpled and soft-eyed. "In Argentina, it's kind of urgent --"

"What is it?" Bucky asked, sitting up and running a hand through his hair, then getting up to help Steve pack.

"I don't know," Steve said, "some evil lunatic." He gave Bucky a wry glance.

"There's usually an evil lunatic at the end of these stories," Bucky said. He ran his hand along the curve of Steve's spine, and asked softly, "They didn't want me along?"

Steve hesitated, looking at the white t-shirt in his hands and then rolling it up and adding it to the duffel. "No," he said. "They -- you're not cleared for the mission."

It wasn't that it didn't hurt, exactly, but Bucky was prepared for that answer, and frankly it was the right answer to give. He wouldn't have wanted himself in the field right now either, except under dire circumstances. He sat back down on the bed; Steve stopped what he was doing abruptly and put the duffel bag aside, putting both of his hands on Bucky's knees. "Bucky," he said, "if you don't want me to go, just say so. I'll stay, I -- I'm sure they can do without me."

Bucky smiled at him. "No," he said. "You need to go. I'll be all right. Just keep in touch, okay? Let me know how it's going, or if you can't, let me know you can't."

"Okay," Steve said. His hands stayed on Bucky's knees for a moment, and then he brought both of them up to cup Bucky's face, and kissed him hard. "I love you," he said into Bucky's open mouth, and he kept kissing Bucky, wet sucking kisses that didn't feel like he was actually ever going to pull away at all, until Bucky, flushed and horny, pushed him gently away with both hands on his chest.

"Go," said Bucky. "They're waiting for you. I'll be here when you get back."

"You'd better be," Steve said, flashing him a grin over his shoulder as he picked up the bag, unhooked his shield from the wall, and turned, at last, to leave.

+++

The apartment was undeniably quieter and much emptier without Steve around. For the first few days, Bucky didn't sleep all that well; it was hard not to think of empty spaces as being somehow haunted. It was hard not to let them get filled up with ghosts, imagined or real.

Still: He wasn't at loose ends, like he had been before. There were places he could go without feeling like he was just wasting time, people who would see him and know him - would keep him from thinking that maybe he existed only in his own mind, or in a sort of half-light where he could only always be a stranger, apart from the world. There was the possibility that the sense of not belonging here would never quite go away, but the longer he stayed alive, the more time he spent in the world, the more he started to believe that maybe everyone felt that feeling, at least a little bit.

He didn't know anything about the mission that Steve was on, and that was the hardest part, maybe; when you didn't know specifics, it was alarmingly easy to let your mind wander and come up with the most gruesome possibilities. That had always been part of Bucky's job, after all - or it had been during the war, before they had taken most of the Winter Soldier's autonomy, leaving him just a weapon, to be fired when necessary. The best kind of second-in-command was the kind who could see the potential for disaster just around the corner and avert it before it happened.

But Steve called when he could, which wasn't often, and though the shitty reception made Bucky think he was probably somewhere on some godforsaken desert steppe, it was good to hear his voice. That and the project that Bucky and Pepper were working on together, a project which required a lot of reading and quite a bit of glad-handing, kept the worry contained most of the time. Not gone, but slightly out of reach, never able to slip in and grip Bucky in the way it had before.

So this was his life. He had settled into a sort of routine before he even realized it; having a job - even if it was a pretty poor excuse for a job, and half the time when he was laughing with Pepper in her office he didn't feel like it was really _work_ at all - stabilized things a little bit. And he realized, when it did, that maybe for a long time he had been afraid of letting himself fall into a routine again, that it would be too much like _before_ , and anything that was too much like that time left him feeling like a watch that somebody had opened up, exposing all his delicate ticking parts to the harsh world. The thing about watches, though, was that you could repair them. Given some care and the right tools, you could keep a watch running, and he had started to believe that maybe it was the same way for him.

When Pepper asked him up for dinner, he said yes. They had food that neither Pepper nor Tony had cooked, which was kind of funny, and a bottle of bourbon that Tony pulled out, saying to Bucky, "I heard you were a whiskey man." And that was even funnier - that people knew these things about him, that they _remembered._ Funny in a good way.

The whiskey still had that same burn to it, going down; Bucky had spent some time lamenting the fact that it tasted the same, felt the same in his throat, but didn't do anything else - but now, smiling at Pepper and Tony over the top of the glass, he thought: Maybe the fact that it tasted the same was good enough. He could live without the rest.

The weather had started to warm up, and sometimes, at night and in the mornings especially, the damp outside left the windows with a sort of fog on them that reflected the lights of the city and made the whole apartment feel like a dream - the yellow glow of the light, the blues and purples of the shadows. Like something out of one of Steve's paintings, Bucky thought, and then, laughing to himself, that he didn't need to be drunk at all to think stupid things like that.

JARVIS kept the bedroom a couple of degrees warmer now that Steve was gone, and it was nice. It helped Bucky fall asleep faster. The warmth made him drowsy in a way that he couldn't remember it ever having used to, but memory was fallible, and his and Steve's apartment before the war had usually been cold - and there was a lot of cold after that in his memories too. It didn't matter, anyway; he closed his eyes and thought of Steve, and when he did, he saw Steve's smile in the morning, the curve of Steve's shoulders as he poured himself a cup of coffee, the way Steve tilted his chin up just slightly if he thought you were going to disagree with him. There were bruises in there too, but Steve had always been the kind to have bruises, even if they faded faster nowadays. It didn't feel sinister.

He woke up a few hours later, around three in the morning. It was a surprised kind of awakening - his heart was going fast, and he was sweating a little, but if there had been a dream, he couldn't remember it.

He was thirsty as hell, though; he licked his lips and got out of bed, grabbing his phone from where it rested on the bedside table. The lights came up slightly, and the floor warmed under his feet as he walked through the apartment, toward the kitchen.

He poured himself a glass of water from the tap and stood looking out at the slumbering city as he drank it slowly, feeling almost entranced. His phone buzzed as he finished the glass, and he picked it up, thumbing the home button to unlock it. There was a photo from Steve, of him and Natasha making silly faces, cross-eyed, Natasha with her tongue out. He snorted, and as he went to type a reply, a second message appeared: _Mission over soon, I think. 2 days?_ and then another. _I miss you!_

Bucky smiled, filling the glass up one more time and carrying it with him back into the bedroom. _i miss you too_ , he sent back, setting the water on the bedside table and then curling up again, tangled in the comforter. _see you soon._

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has read, left kudos, and/or commented on this story, and especially to those of you who have been generous enough to leave multiple comments. A final thank you also to Eli for your tireless and patient efforts in listening to me anxiously blabber about not having any idea what I was doing multiple times during this story. I so deeply appreciate having had all of you along for the ride, and I hope that you enjoy this last chapter.
> 
> As a parting gift, I've uploaded a second mix that I made in the course of the story - it's definitely a "party" mix and I listened to it a lot while writing the multiple party scenes. You can find it available for download [here](http://www.4shared.com/zip/FwevKIUzba/just_two_bodies.html).
> 
> It's been a pleasure having you all along for this journey. As usual, you can find me [on tumblr,](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/) where my ask box is always open should you have any questions, comments, or if you'd just like to chat. I'm also [on twitter.](http://twitter.com/paquito)
> 
> Once more: Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading. Until next time.


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